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.

Sometimes we take rambling neighborhood walks. Mostly I don’t bring the camera along because although I love it, it’s heavy. But on this gorgeous day last week I just had to! I wanted to get some photos of our neighbor’s spectacular tulips that completely line her whole front yard. At first the kids acted like it was a grueling forced march, but they cheered up before too long.

Asher has skills! I have mental pictures of 3-year-old Lucas balancing on these same rocks, wearing these same clothes. This is both astounding and comforting to me, somehow. Yes, I have been here—exactly here—before.

See what I mean? Could not miss the opportunity to view these girls up close!

This is our neighborhood beehive, in the (left) crack of this living tree. If it were a little higher up I might think we had found Pooh’s tree hive in the Hundred Acre Wood. I like watching the bees flying in and out on their busy errands.

Lucas at the Bird Tract Park—with obligatory found stick. “Don’t photograph me, Mom.” Hard to resist when the sunlight bounces off his hair like that.

And this? Self portrait.

Little bits of beauty I found in my backyard.

The other day, grandma came over to help us with our worm farm. She gave it to me last May as a birthday present, and much to my surprise, I’ve managed to keep the worms alive all this time, feeding them kitchen scraps and coffee grounds. I wasn’t too excited about this part, however.

Grandma is less squeamish than me and has years’ worth of experience farming worms. While I worked on an editing project, she and two gleeful boys tackled the job of removing the compost, separating the worms into three groups (one group for the garden, one for the worm farm, and one for a new worm farm for her to take home), and restarting it afresh, returning the not-yet-compost food parts to the farm.

That’s a lot of worms, man! Good stuff!

Then she let the kiddos paint flower pots that she brought them. (Thanks for the pictures, Grandma.)

Unsurprisingly, some wackiness ensued. Lucas likes to impress …

And Asher really enjoys the hose, no matter the weather. In case you’re wondering, yes, they were dressed identically (their choice) but you probably can’t tell with all the mud.

The year has turned a quarter, and I’m loving the open windows and fresh breezes. I’m wearing a sundress! Ian and I had some much-needed time out together this weekend and it was wonderful. Some spring cleaning is in order, but you needn’t worry because we won’t try to do it all at once. We like to ease into these things a little bit each day. My dear hubby is currently tackling his pile of ironing.

I’ve pulled the shorts from older cousins out of the garage for Lucas to wear in the coming weeks and given away a box, a giant bag, and two grocery sacks of toddler clothes to two darling boys we know. Out with the old and too-small!

Lucas and I have planted some seeds straight into the ground, which is something I’ve never had much luck with before. We figure it’s unlikely we’ll have anymore frost, and since we’ll probably get several more rains we’ll take advantage of the free water. We planted some beans, red chard, spinach, poppies, nasturtiums, and morning glories, all from seed packets I had lying around. I don’t know if we’ll get lucky and get some shoots, but it was worth a shot and better than discarding seeds from past years.

We have gathered together some of our spring books to enjoy. Here are some favorites that we own.

• Spring: Poems, Songs and Stories, Winstones Press
• The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth, by Ellen Jackson
• When the Earth Wakes, by Ani Rucki
• Too Many Rabbits and Other Fingerplays About Animals, Nature, Weather, and the Universe, by Kay Cooper
• The Lion and the Little Red Bird, by Elisa Kleven
• The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, by DuBose Heyward
• The Golden Egg Book, by Margaret Wise Brown
• Selected spring poems from The Chidren’s Hour Best Loved Poems, vol 5
• Flower Fairies of the Spring, by Cecily Mary Barker
• Best Hikes with Children Around Sacramento, Bill McMillon

Hope you”re enjoying spring weather, spring cleaning, and spring reading, too!

Did you catch that sky last night? After the rain, my little corner of the world was ablaze with the sunset spilling over every wet surface it could find.

And someone I know just had to splash about in the lava.

Beauty sometimes washes over even my suburban, sidewalk-lacking street. All you have to do is notice.

This is something I’ve wanted to do since I was about four years old, sitting on the floor of Dotty’s home and playing with her “Sleeping Beauty”-style spinning wheel.

I took a spinning class this weekend from my new friends at Syrendell. (Lucky for me they are local!) Jennifer Tan and her daughter, Joey, taught us how to use the drop spindle and let us try spinning on a wheel, too. The drop spindle is fairly simple in concept and it didn’t take too long to catch on. My first attempt is on the far right of the photo below. I started with a brown wool roving, then spun some white Merino wool with tencil, then tried a muted green/blue wool. It’s all on one skein. It’s lumpy and wonky and imperfect and I love it!

We got to create batts of prepared wool fiber on a drum carder, which felt surprisingly like painting with wool and created such a gorgeous, fluffy, ready-to-spin batt. I loved laying out the colors and wondering how they might combine in the spun yarn.

I bought a spindle for myself and took home the two batts of fiber I had prepared, one green and one rainbow. On Saturday afternoon, I spun the green into yarn and Lucas helped me. He was really curious and I think we can do this together. On Sunday, I spun the rainbow fiber and it was wonderful! It has lumps and places that are over- or underspun. Making perfectly even, consistent yarn is clearly not something one learns in a day!

Now I have something else to do with all that wool roving I’ve bought over the years for needle-felting.

Yesterday at about 6:30 Pacific time: I’m finally one of those people on the airplane using a laptop. I’m maybe halfway through my flight now. The flight was delayed two hours and I didn’t leave SF airport until 3:45. My day has been fine, but a little long. It seems like more of this time should be productive, but there is a lot of waiting to move and when I tried to get Internet service in the airport, both Mozilla Firefox and IE said they couldn’t find the network connection. I could see the free public network, connect to it, but couldn’t surf. Frustrating. My boss has been worrying about my traveling today. The taxi company that’s supposed to pick me up at the airport knows my flight has been delayed.

I’m already missing my family. Yes, I’m having a small adventure. Yes, I got to see snow-covered Rockies out my window. That’s wonderful and I wish I was better at enjoying my time alone. It is a strange unease, though. Kind of like maybe I forgot to bring along two arms and a leg on this trip. There won’t be much time for fun or sightseeing, though. I’m working almost all the hours I’m in New Jersey.

I packed a tiny sewing project with me this time. A few pieces of felt, about six pins, needle and embroidery floss. And Mom lent me the niftiest little device—a little thread cutter with no visible (forbidden) blade. It’s a small brass pendant hanging around my neck. Pull a thread through any of the slots around the edge of the pendant and it goes in past the blade and cuts, just like magic! I am wishing I had had more time at home to cut out all the pieces of felt I need because I’ve already sewn the bulk of what I did bring and now I’ve run out of project. The whole thing was well conceived except for its duration. I didn’t bring along my knitting.

Today 8:30 pm Eastern time: I’m exhausted! After I’m done with writing this I’m calling home and then going to sleep. I didn’t get to my hotel until 1:45 am today. Got 4.5 hours of sleep and then hit the ground running for 8 hours of meeting today, plus a dinner. It all went well and I think this could be an awesome project. I’m kind of wishing that in this room full of PhDs and EDDs that I had more than a BA under my belt. This is textbook publishing, so that stuff matters—kind of. Anyway, everyone is warm and friendly and very knowledgeable.

Tomorrow we meet from 8:30 am to 2:30 pm, then head to the airport. I’ll arrive in Sacramento sometime near midnight—if everything goes perfectly and my two flights aren’t delayed. Rain tomorrow here, but snow in Chicago. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I’ve only seen a teeny-tiny slice of New Jersey, but what I’ve seen is very pretty. Bare, deciduous woods with snow on the ground, punctuated by gorgeous, big homes. No fences, not much yard, just woods.  I’m truly grateful to be here and to be doing this. I just miss my family and my husband’s strong arms around me. Tomorrow I will rock it, and then I will make a long trek home.

Oh what a time we had!

We decided to crack open the wonderful cheesemaking kit that our dear friends Tox and Shannon brought us. This past Saturday we made a special trek to Whole Foods for pasturized (not ultra pasturized) whole milk. We probably can get it elsewhere, but weren’t certain where, and we were quite sure we could find what we needed there. Whole Foods also has raw milk, which is supposed to be best for cheese, but as it was really pricey, we decided not to use raw milk on the first try. (You know, in case the magic didn’t work.)

Lucas dissolved the citric acid in chlorine-free water.

The kit came with everything we needed except the milk and the chlorine-free water.

Here’s our milk, frothy and cooking.

We slowly heated the milk to 90° F, added the rennet, and waited for it to coagulate the milk solids.

Then we tested to see if it had done it’s job. Yep, the whey was clearish and the milk solids (curds) were congealed and looked like custard.

I think Asher is praying to the goddess of milk, Hathor, here. Daddy carefully cut the curds.

The curds were returned to the heat and heated to 110° F. We had to make a water bath (185° F) and dip our colander full of mozzarella curds into the hot water. This made them elastic and stretchable!

Then we were able to   s  t  r  e  t  c  h our mozzarella (we ate some at this point). Stretching elongates the proteins (but I don’t know what that means).

We formed it into our heart shape. It cooled in its ice bath for 10 minutes and voilà, MOZZARELLA CHEESE!

Kitchen science is awesome. Now here’s the crazy part: If we had been better prepared and more experienced, we could have taken the whey, the byproduct of the mozzarella, and make … more cheese from it. The whey must be used within three hours though, and we weren’t prepared to start a new cheesemaking project then. It was time to eat!

Thanks, Tox and Shannon!

It’s teacher in-service week around here, which means my kids have the week off school and daycare. I’m getting help from grandma and some friends here and there, which is great because I have a big meeting to prepare for. Next week I’m flying to New Jersey for two days of meetings. I’m excited and nervous. It’s my longest trip away from my kids ever—three days!

The weather has turned so exquisitely springlike it’s making me feel a little drunk. Crocuses and daffodils are blooming. The quinces in the neighborhood are bursting out coral blossoms. Today I noticed my flowering plum tree has its first blossoms. Hallelujah! I know more rainy, cold weather is ahead. It’s OK. I’m just glorying in our false spring and enjoying the moment. The sun on my face feels spectacular. Yesterday we enjoyed some late afternoon time at our local schoolyard.

Today, Lucas and I left the house in short-sleeved T-shirts. Out of habit and a belief that Asher still doesn’t regulate his own temperature all that well, I made him wear two long-sleeve shirts. At about 1:30 this afternoon he turned to me and stammered something I couldn’t make out. Then he gathered his thoughts and said, quite clearly, “I’m so sweaty!” Oh! Sorry kid. Let’s take off a shirt.

The boys and I visited Great Grandmother RoRo and Great Grandaunt Nana today. It was good to see them, but also strange. My children don’t relate well to Ro at all, which makes me sad because she was such fun when I was a child. These sweet ladies look pretty well and we sat outside in the sunshine together and watched the boys play.

Later at home I gave the kids haircuts. Asher really hates this procedure. He cries and says I’m hurting him, and freaks out whenever the shorn hairs touch his skin. To get him to stay in the chair so I could do the job, I had to give him a Valentine chocolate cut into four pieces. It took a lot of patience on both our parts, but we ended up with an OK cut.

This is one of Lucas’s shots from yesterday evening. I like the color.

Life is good. We are fine. Hope you are too!