Simplicity Parenting

The Morning Bird Show

Quality programming brought to you by The Nature Channel. :-)

Sorry for the poor video quality. You can't see them well but several weeks ago the daycare kids, Alex and me all made bird seed ornaments. We used cookie cutters for molds and gelatin to hold them together. We made trees and stars, and snowmen. Adding a hemp string halfway through the molding process and presto we had bird seed ornaments! We went out one lovely Autumn day and hung them on our spindly tree in front of the play room. The cats and the kids all have a great morning bird show to watch and they never get tired of watching this particular channel!

A New Shop for The Liberated Child

I have a new CafePress Shop! Check it out! Click here- The Liberated Child.

Here's a peak at what you'll find...

Welcome Snow!

Candy Cane Playdough

Alex has been playing with for days. 

I hope all our daycare kids enjoyed their playdough, too!

December Edition Owl Creek Gazette

Owl Creek Gazette December Edition

Click the link above or the icon below to open PDF.

The Owl Creek Gazette serves the self-reliant community in print and online with a nod to the independent, out-of-the-box, off-the-grid, voluntaryist and kitchy nature in each of us.

Making Candy Houses

This week we made candy houses!!  Thank you to all my families for being so generous and donating supplies!  

Here the kids are ready to put their houses together. They aren't at all excited, you can tell. lol

 I put a little bit of everything in several plates and put them all on the table. We used the shoe boxes to hold the houses and for carrying them home.

Here are pics of some of the houses. I should have started snapping before they went back into the boxes, but they really are adorable. The kids had so much fun with these!

 

Hand Cookie Ornaments

How cute are these? I hope they make it home in one piece. The kids made these today for their holiday trees. They are sugar cookies in the shape of each child's hand. 

Have sneaky suspicion some may get nibbled on before finding a branch to hang from. 

Yummies I've Been Working On

Last weekend Alex had an early holiday gift-giving with his dad, Paul, since he lives out of state. So, I whipped up some homemade treats to help make their weekend a little more special.

Here is some really, really good fudge syrup, that wasn't supposed to be syrup. I was actually trying my hand (and failing- again) at fudge but it just never quite got there. So I turned my lemons into Hot Fudge Syrup. Fabulous, right? Yay me! 

And this baby here is my favorite pie ever. Besides my mother's no-bake chocolate-oatmeal-peanut butter cookies recipe (which everyone and their mother has) this is the only thing I can bake that turns out well every time. It's Peach Cream pie, y'all. And I know that's not very holiday-y but I figured since it has nutmeg and allspice it's at least a distant cousin to traditional holiday baked goods and is welcome at my house. 

We also made some gingerbread cookies but I wasn't able to photograph them before Alex ate them all. Oh well. They were pretty darling. Luckily I have plans to make another batch next week. :-)

Table Settings

We aren't much for standing on ceremony in my home. We drink out of mason jars, for crying out loud. But there are occasions when I wish I had attended the Ms. Manners Etiquette School, like every year when I went with Paul, Alex's dad, to his annual fancy bankers dinner, and there were like 22 pieces of flatware around my plate (well, it felt like there were that many) and I just wanted to eat a salad- but with which fork? OMG- crisis!! So, when I came upon this table setting tutorial photo I knew I would never again need to feel insecure at a dinner party. 

It feels awfully silly to me sometimes that people even care about things like this, but I found you care an awful lot when it's you sitting in front of a setting like the ones above and having no clue.  For reals, ya'll. Chalk it up to my redneck upbringing, but the best dinners I've had with family and friends have been those where the plates don't match, the glasses are old jelly jars, the food is laid out buffet style, and you rinse off your fork in the kitchen sink when it's time to eat desert.  :-)   Good times.

The Cost of A Sweet Tooth

Update 12/14/12: So, I realize how very hypocritical it is for me to post this anti-sugar bit when following it are several candy activities and sugary treats. Kind of like me and Alex beginning our three week trial as vegans the day after Thanksgiving. :-) Oh well. Enjoy!

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With the holidays come lots of baking and goodies. I'm no exception. I may use organic raw sugars, or honey in my recipes over white sugar, but the reality is this is a time of year when we really feel like we have a free pass to overindulge. 

Now, not to be a goody-goody (OK, maybe I am a little), but the truth is Alex and I rarely eat sugary foods. I'm personally a salt person and happily pass up ice cream and cookies most of the time. It's just not my thing. I eat sea salt, too, which is good for you, unlike table salt and sodium in packaged foods. We use honey often in tea and oatmeal, but since we eat mostly whole foods, it's a rare event for us to eat anything with added sugar in it. I also have low blood pressure, no signs of diabetes, am cancer-free, and Alex and I have never had a cavity.

So during the holidays I don't feel at all guilty about baking my heart out and eating all the yummy things that we love, because it's the exception to our normal diet and not the rule. 

But what if you have a sweet tooth? What if you, or your children, or your family eat a mostly packaged, processed foods diet, and consume sugar not just at the holidays, but every day? 

In our grandparent's and great grandparent's time, Americans consumed about two pounds of sugar every year. That sugar came from mostly natural and good-for-you sources like maple syrup, molasses, sorghum, honey, and sugar cane.

Today, Americans wolf down over one hundred pounds of sugar per annum. And they get that sugar from the rampant consumption of packaged and overly processed foods like cereal, soda, pasta, bread, canned food, juice, seasonings and nearly everything else that comes in a container, box or plastic bag. 

When sugar is hidden in everyday packaged foods, it's easy to not think about how much sugar you are putting into your body. The fact is, sugar is as addictive as cocaine. It gives that commercial 'this is your brain on drugs' a whole new meaning.  

Here is an interesting infographic to really drive this point home. 

Tip: You may want to use your screen's zoom feature to really see the details of the graphic below, or right click and 'save as' to open elsewhere on your computer and zoom there.

There is a book I read a while ago, titled Bringing Up Bebe'. An excellent read for moms and dads, by the way. An American mother raising her baby in France. She notices that new French mothers seem to have no problem shedding pounds after they deliver, and don't seem frazzled or stressed. 

She herself is doing the typical American thing of starving herself and depriving herself of all things yummy and exercising like a nut to take off the baby pounds, to little avail. Plus she's a bit of a basket case. But the French mothers tell her they would never dream of such a militant view toward their body and dieting. They are careful about what they eat during the week, eating healthy foods, but then allowing themselves to eat whatever they want on the weekends. The American mother assumes they mean whatever they want *within reason*, but no. They mean whatever they want, however much of it they want. Junk food, sugar, bread, everything. Then during the week they go back to healthy eating until the next weekend. 

The French mothers say this is how they love themselves. That restricting things all the time would doom anyone to failure (as we Americans know but haven't really learned), and knowing you get to indulge sometimes is the very thing that makes their effort successful.  

Weight issues aside, being healthy is not a number on a scale. Health is measured from the inside, and sugar and sodium wreak havoc on your body's ability to function properly when consumed so frequently your body never gets a chance to heal. So I say give your body a break from the refined sugar melodrama and then you will really be able to enjoy those occasions when you indulge your sweet tooth- guilt free.