Happy little eggs

Easter was always my favorite holiday as a little girl. My mom would boil up dozens of eggs and as a family we'd all gather around the table together, endlessly dipping into the rainbow of colors.

Together. Looking back I think that was the biggest part of it. Easter was more about being together, doing together, laughing and enjoying and goofing around, than any of the other holidays. My dad would sit at the table and dip eggs with us, we'd hide them in the craziest places, and then have contests to see who could make their chocolate bunny last the longest. I never won. (I still have no willpower when it comes to chocolate.)

It's been a long time since we all sat down for Easter together, but I'm trying to keep that spirit of togetherness alive in my children, especially at Easter. Since we don't eat eggs, and we've given up the plastic ones (conveniently they don't sell them here in Switzerland), I whipped up an easy little pattern-- another one of my patterns of desperation. My girls, ages 7 and 10, helped knit them up. I hope you'll enjoy making them as much as we did.

To download the pdf of this pattern, please click HERE.  You can also find it on Ravelry.

Felted Knit Eggs

Materials:
wool yarn scraps-- worsted or bulky wt
US #8 or #9 dpns
Wool stuffing

Instructions:
CO 12 st, and divide evenly onto 3 needles.
Place marker, and join into the round. K 1 row.

Row 1: *K1fb, k3* repeat to end of row (15 st)
Rows 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11: knit every stitch
Row 3: *K1fb, k4* repeat to end of row (18 st)
Row 5: *K1fb, k5* repeat to end of row (21 st)
Row 7: *K1fb, k6* repeat to end of row (24 st)
Row 9: *K1fb, k7* repeat to end of row (27 st)
(begin decreasing)
Row 12: *k2tog, k7* repeat to end of row (24 st)
Rows 13, 15 and 17: knit every stitch
Row 14: *k2tog, k6* repeat to end of row (21 st)
Row 16: *k2tog, k5* repeat to end of row (18 st)
Row 18: *k2tog, k4* repeat to end of row (15 st)
Row 19: *k2tog, k3* repeat to end of row (12 st)
Row 20: *k2tog, k2* repeat to end of row (9 st)
Row 21: *k2tog, k1* repeat to end of row (6 st)

Cut yarn and thread through remaining loops to close top of egg, and weave in the end. Fill your egg with stuffing (moderately full--don't overstuff), and then thread your yarn end through the CO edge, pull it closed, and weave in the ends. Voila.

If you use wool stuffing, both the egg and the stuffing will felt together and create a nice weighted egg that bounces. You can also use fiberfil, but the egg itself won't felt as well as the wool-stuffed egg. Use fiberfil if you want to create a hollow egg, as shown above, for hiding little trinkets in. Once it's felted, just make an incision and remove the fiberfill.

To felt: Throw your eggs in a pillowcase or garment bag and wash in HOT water in the washing machine with some jeans or towels. I only ran mine through once because I ran out of laundry to wash, but feel free to do what you need to do. Don't forget to allow time to dry before the big hunt begins. :-)

Inside the Goetheanum

A while back I promised a look inside the Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. It's hard to know what to expect when you see the outside form of this massive structure.... but once you push open the heavy doors, it's like walking into another world.

Here's a peek at the ground floor, minus the cafe, book/art stores, and bathrooms. The bathrooms were pretty nice, too. There seemed to be art exhibitions at every turn, including two huge lazured murals. This is but a glimpse, and the pictures hardly do it justice, but I think you'll get the idea.

Whoosh!

That's the sound of another blogless month passing me by. March was fraught with so many things it's hard to know where to begin.

First, there was that job in Texas that we didn't get. Imagine homeschooling in a place with libraries, a huge homeschooling community, two gardening seasons, and wonderful friends. I don't have to tell you how bummed I was about that.

In the middle of that was Fasnacht, the crazy three-day carnival in Europe. Imagine streets filled with piccolo playing masked folks and confetti so thick it comes up to your ankles in spots. Fasnacht really deserves a post of its own (fingers crossed)... but towards the tail-end of that I had some health issues and had to find a doctor, fast.

I don't particularly like going to the doctor and avoid it as much as humanly possible, so you can imagine what kind of pain/suffering it takes for me to seek out a doctor in a foreign-speaking country. For one thing, most of them take vacation the week of Fasnacht, and their answering machines all have messages in a fast, thick Schwytzerdütsch. Speak to me in high German really fast and my eyes start rolling around in my head trying to catch a word or two as they zing by. In Swiss German, goodness... you might as well shoot me. In the end, I found one, and he turned out to be from the states, sort of.

My new motto concerning doctors is, if you're going to see one, see one in Europe. I have now seen three, and each of them sat and listened and took me seriously. There were no "come back if it still hurts in 6 weeks" comments. It was more like seeing a lay-midwife in the US; I felt like a person rather than a number being rushed through the system. I have now been prodded and poked, scoped and scanned, and the diagnosis for now is that I will live, at least for as long as I might normally live anyway. Coming from someone whose family has a history of cancer (my grandmother died when she was my age,) this is a fantastic prognosis.

I've learned so many things from my health scare in Europe:
1. Ovarian cysts can hurt like nobody's business.
2. Colonoscopies, while sounding like possibly the worst torture in the world, are really very interesting procedures. If anyone offers to show you the inside of your colon, say yes.
3. The colonoscopy drink mix is really nasty when it's warm, but with a little bit of apple juice and ice cubes, it's actually drinkable.
4. Anthroposophical gynocologists exist.
5. They don't "drape" for a gyn exam in Europe. Modesty is purely an American thang.
6. Hormones can make everything go haywire. And then some.

We managed to get a little bit of homeschooling accomplished in between my appointments and my laying on the couch clutching my abdomen. I also managed to get some editing done on my novel, a huge feat in and of itself. I put in a couple of really long weekends, and managed to surpass the 50-hour challenge doled out over at Nanoedmo (National Novel Editing Month.) This novel-writing thing has turned out to be another really interesting way to model Perseverance and Commitment for my children. It's a less visual lesson than my last huge undertaking, but it seems to have made an impression on Sunburst who has taken to trying to edit her own Nanowrimo story.

March ended with the bona fide arrival of Spring and the news that we might be facing another move next March, this time to Zurich, where homeschooling has just been made illegal. Lucky us, huh? I suppose we'll be finding out in the next week or two the official status on that. As usual, things are up in the air.

I'm starting to wonder if things felt settled, if I would still recognize it as my life.

Worms, math, and treehouses

Busy week! This week I presented the earthworm, straight out of Klocek's book, Drawing from the Book of Nature. It's still much too cold to go digging for actual worms here, but as avid gardeners, we're no strangers to the amazing, little creatures.



Worms segued very easily into a lesson on fractions when we read that if you cut them in half, they die. But if you only cut off the the hind third, they don't die. Sunburst has been hungry for new math problems, and instead of waiting to present this as a block, I just jumped right in with some ideas from Dorothy Harrar's math book.

Sunburst told me she hated fractions, so we started out with some sentences about fractions being good things and a story illustrating the truth of those sentences: Sunburst gets on the bus with an apple. Her hungry friends get on the bus, and the apple gets shared and cut each turn, until eventually there are sixteen slices - one for each child. Last to get on the bus is an old man who is starving. The kids all decide to share their slices with this old man, so that in the end, he has the entire apple.



And then we did some very simple fraction work to build the foundation.





I also backtracked through Dorothy Harrar's math book and brought forth a lesson from the second grade section-- it seemed more like a fractions story than a multiplication story.




Moonshine did a little math herself, sort of. While Sunburst was busy at work on her fractions tree, Moonshine wanted to draw a little tree of her own. This tree multiplied itself into a dozen treehouses, each one designed with specific friends in mind. When Moonshine gets an idea there is no stopping her.



And what of Kitty Bill? He got in on the drawing fun, too. Sometimes he likes to do that. Other times, like today, he just steals off with a pair of scissors and cuts everything in sight. Of course we prefer it when he draws pictures instead.

Remembering Autumn

Harvesting walnuts in France.



Watching everything turn to gold.



Loading up on winter squash.



Jelly making-- with wine grapes.



Enjoying the organ grinders at the Autumn fair.



Nature table in Autumn.



Moonlit walks along the Rhine.

Harbor seals

While I was hoping for two, so far we're only managing one animal per week for this block. I'm really proud of Sunburst's seals, and we both sort of laughed at how much trouble I'm having with the breathing tones. She's doing a much better job of it than I am.



Here's my progression. I like my first attempt better than my others, though it's mostly done with lines. My second one looks like a steamroller hit him, and the third (done with breathing tones) is nature gone wrong, sort of a seal-groundhog hybrid. Maybe it would have better luck at predicting the coming of spring.

How did Steiner know?

A couple of months ago Sunburst went through this science-hungry phase of checking out nonfiction animal books from our tiny library. After reading three or four of them she asked me if she could write animal reports as part of her homeschooling.

I about fell over. How did Steiner know? It's times like this, when the Waldorf grades curriculum he designed meets up exactly with my daughter's interests and needs, that I have to sit back and truly acknowledge the genius of Rudolf Steiner.

So last week we began our fourth grade zoology block. I'm using Charles Kovacs's book, The Human Being and the Animal World, because I love the way he explains things. I also have a copy of Drawing from the Book of Nature, by Dennis Klocek, which is also superb. Both books start in different places though-- Kovacs starts with cuttlefish while Klocek starts with worms. It would probably have been smarter of me to follow Klocek and start with the easier drawings, but I got so excited about Kovacs's book that I jumped right in with cuttlefish.

Because Sunburst wanted to actually write her own report, we talked about outlines as being a list of things she might want to know the answer to. We took the list, arranged it in groupings, and then I sent her off to find the answers. It turns out we have ZERO English-language books about cuttlefish at our library, so thank goodness for the internet! I set her up with the wikipedia page and let her go to town, and it felt like a good, safe compromise. She came back with answers and wrote a pretty decent report.

The drawing is another thing altogether. While Sunburst is happy with her drawings, and that should really be the goal here, I still feel I need to spend more time working on Klocek's idea of this "breathing tone," or shaping without any noticeable edge. We do it with crayons, but I find the sharpness of pencils lend themselves toward lines much too easily. Also, it would be fantastic to observe these creatures in real life... but we live in a city. The reality is that if we want to observe anything we'll have to go to the zoo or watch videos. Between you and me, when the windchill is 21 degrees, I'd rather preview some Youtube videos than drag kids to the zoo.

I know. Waldorf purists are shaking in their shoes; I'm breaking all the rules.

I do that sometimes.

We drew our interpretations of the cuttlefish from Kovacs's book, and then made some sketches while we watched some Youtube. The colored drawing is what we came up with from watching the videos. I don't know what kind of cuttlefish it was, but it sure had longer tentacles than the one in the book. It was easy to become enamored of these little guys-- we were especially fond of the video that showed what appeared to be a mom and dad protecting a baby from the scary camera crew. It could have been a menage a tois for all I know, but it sure looked like a family to us.

Anyway, here's Sunburst's MLB entry. The drawings are pasted in from her sketchbook.



And here are my versions of the same drawings:

It's time

We're giddy on this side of the globe.

We've been giddy since the day of the election when we whipped up these Obama-cakes in anticipatory celebration... and now, it's time. It's really time!

Welcome President Obama.

A blessed end of the year

Our first Christmas season in Europe looked a little like this:



Or rather a LOT like that. We couldn't turn a corner without running into some kind of festival of lights. That's downtown Basel, Switzerland-- home to what has been called the best Christmas market in Switzerland. That's actually NOT the market, just one of the shopping streets.



Christmas market in Colmar, France --after the ice skating excursion. Very pretty and Very cold. And the lights reflecting off Colmar's "Little Venice" canal.








At home we did our usual Advent celebration-- lighting the candles, reading a story every night from The Light in the Lantern, and singing.





Several years ago we made a string of tiny felt stockings for Advent. Rather than put trinkets in them, each one holds a different holiday song printed on a tiny scroll of gold parchment paper. So each night of Advent we sing a new song together-- which if truth be told, is one of my favorite parts of the holiday. The kids love it almost as much as I do.



And the lovely Advent calendar I picked up at the Goetheanum.


And making....
In all our haste we forgot to bring our Christmas ornaments, so we had to start from scratch. the girls and I made some pinecone gnomes and cornhusk wreaths:






We also managed to forget our stockings... and funny, they don't seem to sell stockings here like they do in the States, presumably because all their "Santa" business happens on Dec. 6th for Samichlaus/St. Nikolaus Day where he leaves the goodies in children's shoes.

So we all got busy making stockings out of my linen stash that I brought from the states, a white Ikea pillowcase (seriously), some red wool yarn, and embroidery floss. the stockings are each lined with a different cotton print fabric-- though of course you can't tell in the picture. The elf pattern came from Wee wonderfuls, the girl is from a Japanese embroidery book, and the odd one is from a Klee painting. Everyone helped in different ways, including Kitty Bill who kept insisting on a robot stocking which led me to the lovely pattern.






And the holiday baking....
Bohemian Braided bread, an old family tradition, as well as strange cut-out cookies (including a robot), and the star tree cookie. I always wanted to buy the star tree cookie cutters from one of those magazines, but never got around to it. I picked up these at the grocery store here... where they sell all kinds of amazing cookie cutters.




And our nature table...
Which of course had a make-over for the holiday. From the barren first light of stones, which left the kids in a state of great expectation:




to the culmination of Advent:




On Christmas Eve all the church bells around the city started ringing at 11pm. They went off for 5-10 minutes and then sounded again at midnight. With all the noise, the girls didn't fall asleep until 1am, and Einstein and I were up until 2:30 wrapping the very last gifts and embroidering the very last stocking.

Then the strangest, loveliest thing happened. We were awakened an hour before dawn by the sound of voices rising up in song. So like the story goes, I ran to the window and threw up the sash, and there in the street below me were carolers. In the cold, dark of Christmas morning. Holding candles. And singing. It was magical and beautiful and surreal.