Cameron's Recommended Books

The Mistmantle Chronicles by M. I. McAllister
Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan
The Redwall Series by Brian Jaques.
Anything by Neil Gaiman!
The Oliver Nocturne series by Kevin Emerson

The Skullduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy

The Kids' Garden

Catherine's mini bell peppers. She harvests a pepper or two from this every couple of days.


Catherine and our Japanese bantam, Sakura.


These Jack-be-little pumpkins are growing like wildfire all over the kid's garden. We've already harvested about a dozen and there are still lots of little green ones on the vines.


Cameron and Peony, the most pampered chicken in our flock.


The kids' bean/gourd teepee is taking over and we have gourds galore!

Sewing & Cooking

The kids have been on a cooking and sewing kick for the last few months. Cameron has been sewing on the machine and by hand. A few weeks ago he made a bunch of bags made out of some funky brown batik fabric that he thought looked like tree bark. They were all different sizes from dice bag size to small shoulder bag size. They were primarily for his Richard Cypher costume that he's been putting together. Last week, he created a custom belt bag for his heelies wheels out of denim.




And here are some of Catherine's creations. She's 5 and has never done hand sewing before, yet she made these by herself over a couple of days. She only asked for help getting the needle through the fabric on the bottom seam of the blue doll and sewing up a couple of small holes where her stitches were loose. She copied the pattern from a book, traced it onto the fabric (different fabrics on front & back), sewed them, stuffed them, & sewed on the buttons. She has carried these everywhere and even sleeps with them.



Cooking is an ongoing interest for my kids, but once in a while they get in the mood to find new recipes. We took a trip to the library and these are some of the ones they checked out and made things from:


Well, except for that Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook in the upper left. That was my favorite cookbook when I was a kid and I went on a search for it a few months ago. Found a used copy in really good shape on amazon and snatched it up. The kids love it as much as I did! They've made almost every recipe in it several times. Here are the "Batnana Split" and "Batnana Sundae" that they came up with because of a recipe in that book:

They were made with homemade cottage cheese instead of ice cream, homemade yogurt, bananas, strawberries, and raw nuts.