August – our month in pictures

Its been a busy busy month. Lots of camping, eating, and spending time with friends and family. Hope you are all enjoying the last bits of Summer -

Not to be a humbug, but I am excited that my favorite season is right around the corner! (and my anniversary is tomorrow, and on Wednesday Vince officially exits his 20′s. A busy pie filled week is in store!)

A few of B’s sweet gatherings..

Adventures of our pet mole and pigeon

Jori-Lann (fierce hunting machine that he is) brought a live mole into the house tonight to feed us poor helpless humans.
He dropped it on the floor and it scurried under Bennie’s kitchen. Well, paddled, rather. those legs are so funny – not really made for running, mostly for digging. so cute!!! He scampered around the living room, squeaking loudly whenever he bumped into furniture, until we finally caught him in a paper sack. Just a poor squeaky baby mole.

Much to the dismay of our cat and garden, we returned our baby mole to the very deep mole hole in our front yard. Our tender-hearted girl was delighted, and has been asking for a mole pet “to keep our cat company” ever since.

On another cat-hunting note, a baby pigeon found its way into our house not long after. Whether it flew in an open window or Jori-Lann brought it in, we aren’t sure. We found it huddling in a dark corner of our bedroom, very still. I left the window open for it to fly out on its own, and closed the bedroom door to keep our cat out. However, every time B and I went in to check on our pigeon, it was still in the corner and Jori-Lann had yet again come in through the open window and was laying on the bed purring. (Oddly, not really bothering the pigeon. Just hanging out. He’s a lover, really.) Finally I scooped up the pigeon and B and I set it free out the window.

There is little more delightful to a little girl than rescuing a helpless animal in need. Our cat is really enriching our lives.

Lemonade Stand

Note the sign, labeling spilled juice marks as examples!

This was a few weeks ago, on an especially sunny day. Bennie and her neighbor-girl gang really hustled, biking and scootering up and down the street calling to all the neighbors and dog walkers. In their busy afternoon they made $15, at their sliding scale of  “free – .50cents a cup”.

Then the juice and cups started running low, (due to their frequent tasting of their own wares). The new policy became  asking that their customers to drink their juice there and return their cups for washing.  They also started seriously watering down their juice. And telling people their juice was watered down.

I overheard them telling customers, “There was a fly in the juice, but we fished it out. Don’t tell anyone.”

Their sweet honesty garnered them a few repeat customers, though, including the man collecting cans, and a few neighbor dogs.

Garden bits

Though I’ve been loving the cool/wet summer, I know I’m in the minority. Everyone I talk to has been longing for more sun, and our crops have been equally mopey, with the exception of the broccoli, lettuces and dark leafy greens.

The blackberry bushes are, of course, still thriving as well.

More Sunday Parkways!

Woo Hoo! I love Sunday Parkways, aka, “bike parades”. We went to the outer SE one last weekend. Another mild sunburn for me, but otherwise a good time was had all around. I was once again pulling the red support wagon while Vince chased Benecia, this time on her pedal bike.

Break at the park for hula hooping, face painting and a bit of live music, then off again. When the Parkways ended at 3 we met some friends for our Sunday Potluck Dinner Club in one of the parks on the route.

Its such a joy to bike at these events and not have to worry about cars. Here I go, pining again for a little bit of old Europe (perhaps minus the bumpy cobblestone, but narrow streets and pedestrian zones would be nice!).

Cafe au Play opens!

Cafe Au Play had their grand opening, just down the street from us! Its an old drive thru mini mart style building, renovated to be a family centered Cafe and community commons. Joe Bikes was there, testing out their cargo bikes and organizing a little bike parade for kids. Llamas to pet, live music, food vendors, hula hoops, face painting and more.

Alas, no camera on hand.

Looking forward to having them in the neighborhood.

Concerts in the Parks

Every summer I find myself sifting through lists and lists of free events and series around Portland and making myself a calendar full of potential things to do each day.

The Concerts in the Park series is something I look forward to every summer. Due to earlier bedtime, we don’t make it to nearly as many as I would like to. Every Tuesday evening (tonight!) at 6:30 there is a concert right up the hill (oh, but what a hill) in Mt Tabor Park. They also have a pre-concert craft time for kids at 6pm. We made it last week, and might just make it tonight….. Melao de Cuba, salsa party! Sounds like a fun one.

The other series I’m looking forward to is the Washington Park Summer Festival in August. If we only make it to one concert up there this summer, I want to see Do Jump on Aug 13th. Physical Theater and acrobatics. They even offer camps and classes for aspiring acrobats, babies on up! Add it to the list of amazing classes for kids in Portland. This city is a homeschooler’s paradise.

Off to eat some shrimp gumbo, thanks to our Cooking Co-op, then maybe head up the hill…

Cooking Co-op

There are many ways to organize a cooking co-op, from a freezer meal exchange, to a soup exchange, to cooking together with friends. What we do is this:

Who: 4 families

When: Once a week

What: Exchange meals. Each person/family cooks a large meal each week, enough for themselves and all 3 other families. Then we meet up and exchange the meals 1 day a week. Each family goes home with not only their own home-cooked meal, but 3 other ones for the week! Needles to say, it saves a lot of time, work and dishes, and shopping for ingredients for multiple meals. Not to mention we get to try new things without eating out!

That’s it, really. Pretty simple. The book suggested various options for organizing the co-op, including delivering dinners to other people’s doors on rotating nights. With our setup we have to cook meals that will keep for a few days, but it works well for us, as we all see each other once a week anyway.

We got the idea from the book, Dinner At your Door: Tips and Recipes for Starting a Neighborhood Cooking Co-op.

We had been doing a dinner club at the time, where a group of 4 or so families took turns hosting the group for dinner on Thursday nights. Then Benecia gave up naps and started going to bed early. Dinner club started at 630, often way across town. Bedtime also started at 630. This presented a little problem for us. Now, problem solved, we have a Sunday potluck club that meets at 4pm in rotating parks, but now we also have the Cooking Co-op, where we exchange meals. The potluck club is definitely social time, whereas the Cooking Co-op is about getting a heap of home cooked meals each week.

The Soup above is what we made this week. One of our favorites, adapted from the recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, Fresh Food Fast, for Spicy Coconut Sweet Potato Soup with collard greens and jasmine rice, topped with mint, cilantro and lime! I love the recipes in this book, and that they are organized by season of the year. Tonight we had some delicious homemade chicken soup from another family.

Loving this!

jaunt to the coast

It got over 75 degrees in Portland (like, 25 degrees over), so we abandoned ship and headed to the beach. We are back now, sweltering once again. So reminisce with me for a moment about how nice it can be to wear long underwear around the camp fire and STILL be cold. I love our chilly coast.

We camped at Cape Lookout State Park. The camping is right off the beach, which is super nice, and the Cape Lookout trail offers amazing views from up on the cliffs.

I like beaches with coves, tide pools, cliffs, climbing rocks, dunes, seashells, driftwood, and nice sand. This was just a nice sandy beach with a temporary and bizarre giant winged ant infestation. Every inch of beach was crawling with them. We eventually bailed and headed up to Oceanside for the day use beach. Love the beach here. Besides most of the features I mentioned earlier, it also has a slightly freaky man made tunnel through a massive cliff, leading you into an otherwise hidden beach.

Hit up the Tillamook Cheese Factory on the way back. Our tired little lady sat up in the observation area watching the cheese roll by for a good 45 minutes. Of course, we tooth-picked all the samples we possibly could, and otherwise gorged ourselves on dairy products until it was time to go.

Waved to a whole heap of cows, and watched our car thermometer rise in temperature as we headed back into the valley that night.

Hope you are keeping cool, wherever you are -

unless you are one of those strange people who crave this sort of weather…

Unusual bits of our week…

The double rainbow ring around the sun was definitely out of the ordinary. The other things are less unusual and more just samples of the daily cuteness around here. There is a lot of it lately.

After a surprise gift of paper dolls in the mail, Benecia set about creating a set of accessories. I have to be extremely careful what bits of cut up paper with writing I pick up off the floor and send to the recycling bin.  It might be a story, recipe, receipt, or lost person/kitty ad. The other day she created a lost ad for herself, which read “Benecia has lost herself” next to a self portrait. She came in to the kitchen holding it and hooting like an owl. She informed me that she, the owl, was looking for Benecia. And oh, how she really really wanted to go door to door “for reals!” and ask the neighbors if they had seen Benecia.

After a Daddy/Daughter date to our lovely local Powells Books, the two returned with a very sweet new book called The Dollhouse Fairy. The main character Rosy loves mornings with her dad, eating french toast and crafting things for her dollhouse. (cool dad, huh?) One day her dad gets sick and goes to the hospital. Nothing serious, but he’s gone for awhile. Meanwhile, Rosy is visited by a teeny garden fairy, Thistle, who is quirky and messy, and needs to convalesce in her dollhouse for awhile due to a hurt wing. Rosy tends to her and loves her, despite and because of her oddities. Daddy returns, but when Rosy goes to show him her fairy, they find that the fairy has healed and returned to her garden home. (Benecia delights in the picture of the fairy right outside the window peeking in, implying she isn’t truly gone.)

We have since been retrofitting dolls and stuffed animals with wings and fluttering them about the house. As you can see, her dollhouse received a makeover as well. (painter after my own heart.) The little dolls who lived in the house oooed and awed as the rather primary color scheme emerged. Surprisingly, no pink. Its thick and impressionistic, and the dolls just love it.

And lastly, the bird happenings. There are so many reasons I enjoy living next to Mt Tabor. The birdwatching is definitely up there. We can’t keep the bird feeders filled up fast enough. This little Northwest Flicker lives with its mate nearby, and is often bug digging in our yard and on our telephone poles. We also have a scrub jay couple with 4 adolescent young. The adults are teaching their fledglings how to catch worms and the importance of harassing and dive bombing our cat at all times. We’ve also seen some hummers sharing the flowers of our gargantuan overgrown borage plants with the bees. More garden pictures to come -

We are staying home this weekend. Maybe watching some fireworks from up on the hill. (can you really call Tabor a Mountain? I think not.) Eating, playing, enjoying being a family. (and, spoiler alert for tomorrow’s post, one of us has a new pedal bike with only two wheels and is already cruising our street unassisted! Hint, it isn’t Vince.)

Wish you all a Happy 4th of July Weekend!