Today Katie decided to get into a new book she got for Christmas, a recipe book entirely devoted to cookies. She really had to twist my arm to go to the baking aisle at the store today, but she persevered, and tonight she made the first of what will certainly be a long and delicious journey through the book.

Tonight, Katie made something that should probably be a controlled substance. The book had a boring name for these, but we have renamed them “Chocolate Bombs.”  Chocolate Bombs contain, among the normal ingredients, chopped white chocolate, pecans, semi sweet chips, milk chocolate chips, and melted chocolate squares.  That wasn’t quite enough for Miss Katie, so she threw together (I kid you not. The kid was just grabbing stuff and throwing it in the pot.) a chocolate glaze to drizzle on top. Was this glaze an option in the recipe? No, ma’am, it was not. Katie just decided it needed a little something. This goes in the book as Home Ec 9000, and she gets an A+.

Have a lookie:

Are you drooling? I’ve had 2, and I still want to plant my face in this plate. Want to get a little closer?

Please excuse the blurries. It was very hard keeping both hands on the camera.

Chocolate Bombs. My new favorite cookie!

My next new favorite cookie has dried cranberries in it. I hope she makes them soon!

I vaguely remember thinking it was a sad and depressing book. I don’t remember stewing on it or being markedly affected by it, which is a strong contrast to my child’s reaction. I saw this child walk into the room in which I was working, and said child (let’s call the child Pat for the sake of anonymity) looked physically ill. I asked Pat if there was something wrong and Pat replied that he/she’d just finished reading Of Mice and Men. Then the tears started to fall, and continued falling through a good discussion of some of the book’s central themes: friendship, justice, moral responsibility, and the lack of a place in our society for some people.

Good books wound the reader. Great books leave scars that the reader will carry and revisit throughout life, and that is precisely why we have chosen to allow our children to begin to bear these wounds while they are relatively young.  Pat was grieving over the realities of life, and it is important to us that we help the children learn how to process the griefs, pain, sin, brokenness, injustices, and immoral behavior of the human race. We want them to ask the questions: “How can we let this happen?” “Why does it have to be this way?” “Where is the justice in this?” “What kind of people do/allow/turn a blind eye to this?” “How do we function in this kind of society?”

More importantly, we want to teach the children to cultivate hope. That seems a little contradictory to the questions above, but they are crucially linked. Yesterday, Pat and I discussed the gamut of reactions that people have to the sort of injustice and plain wrongness he/she encountered in the book, and that is a true reflection of some aspects of society. We talked about the pain he/she was experiencing and contemplated multiplying that pain over and over as a person experiences more and more painful injustices in their life. We talked about the ways people have chosen to deal with that pain, including drugs, fatalism, destructive relationships, and isolation.

The pain is a result of our deep desire for the world to be fair and just. We want the weak to be taken care of and for the strong to be merciful and gentle. We want crimes avenged, and we want injured parties to be restored. We want law applied, and we also want law flexible enough to take into account all the circumstances that provoked a criminal’s action.  Reality is that injustice is everywhere and it cannot be escaped, and that hurts.

When I talk about cultivating hope in the children, I mean that I want them to have their eyes open to the reality of sin in the world, and I want their longings for justice to be directed to the judge of all the earth, who will do right. I want them to be agents of justice and mercy as they are able, but I want them to know and operate in faith that some injustices, some hurts, will only be healed when the King finally puts all things to rights.

I want them to be inoculated with hope as they encounter the world.  This is why I have been and will continue to be an advocate of literature as a core tool in the raising of strong and capable Christian men and women. In books, the children get a glimpse of the realities of the outside world while still in a nurturing and safe environment. They learn to process what they see and become more and more equipped to engage the world with knowledge and hope.

I’d never toss the keys to the car to a kid who’d had no guided experience and learning about how to drive safely. Similarly, I don’t want to thrust a young man or woman out into the world as an independent adult without some guided experience in how to handle it safely and as one who has a sure and comforting hope in the One who will indeed make all things right.

From left to right:

The new cell phone that came via FedEx one day earlier than expected, and assorted start up literature. Is the new phone activated? Nope. Apparently “they” are unable to do so because we weren’t supposed to get the phones until tomorrow. Brilliant.

A Christmas gift in the works. It’s not late. It just has to be done by the end of the week.

The first of my 12 in 2012 knitting projects, and evidence that I did indeed work on something creative for myself for at least 15 minutes today AND worked on my 36 in 366.

My Knitters Almanac scarf, with 3 days of 2012 Kansas skies knit on it. This is such a frivolous project, and my first dally with concept knitting. I can’t imagine how interesting this thing will be in a few months.

Not pictured: Daisy the dog, who has transitioned really well into an inside dog. The expected catastrophes are limited to the mangling of a plastic Smurf toy (I’m sure he had it coming) and some of Katie’s cheetos this afternoon. She followed Katie around for more for quite some time. Apparently we have a fan.

Some in this same group are also attempting to set aside time each day for creative work, and I jumped right on that as well. So while I may not have a picture every day, I’m going to try and work on something each day that’s not for the shop or for a commission.

Yesterday I killed two birds with one stone by casting on a sock with some yarn that a dear friend sent me for Christmas.  The pattern is on my list of patterns to complete for the year, and it’s for me, so I’m counting it as daily creativity! Actually, I’m going to count it for yesterday and today, as I’ve logged a few minutes on it already this morning.

Isn’t that fun? Cable city!

It really is refreshing to plan out a few things for the year and have a couple days of working towards those goals. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens through the year!

Happy New Year to you all!

A friend of mine had taught watercolors to my sons’ class in our co op, so I emailed her to ask about resources, and she graciously shared several with me. We started (well, Katie started) with the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and it was terrific. She finished that a couple of weeks ago, and this last week she began studying watercolors.

We started with the book my friend had used to teach the class, and this week on our library trip, Katie took the initiative to find some helpful books on watercolor techniques. There were so many available that we just grabbed 6-7 and left the rest for other trips. She’s been reading through them and produced this today during school (Yes, it’s June, and yes, it’s Saturday, and yes, I said school.):

The three artistic cells in my body (the ones that inspire some yarn dyeing) think this is incredibly cool. I can’t wait to see what kinds of things she produces. We thought it would be really neat to have a good foundation in Drawing and some experience with Watercolors before we went to the mountains again this summer.

Someone else thinks Katie is incredibly cool with all this painting stuff:

Ellie’s a little shy of showing off her “hockey mouth” at the moment. It might have something to do with her mother asking her to say “thistle” all the time…

Jonathan discovered these in the sunporch. I brought up the subject of rent, but they didn’t seem impressed. I thought at the very least they might give us a damage deposit, but they just stared me down.

When is the test drive?