We visited my brother yesterday who gave Ralph a tank model set with acryllic paints, and I can immerse into the overwhelming and invincible pile of work with no interruptions – so utterly engaged they are into painting the little soldiers.
Thank God for brothers, thank God for boy toys.
{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
Inspired by Soulemama.
What a nightmare of a school run. The road was hopelessly undrivable, and I lost it just 10 metres away from our driveway. It’s been snowing steadily for two months, and about once a week some tractor clears the roads. (The next morning we usually wake up and have to clear the heap that’s blocking the gate, and trust me, it takes a lot of time to shovel a metre of snow that the tractor leaves merrily going by.)
Now imagine that snow that has not been cleared for a week gets rained on all night long. I was kind of hoping for some thaw and an improvement on the road but it is just the other way around, the snow is now the same thickness but all wet, heavy and incredibly sticky. It took a long time to get the kids to school (and a lot of panicked screaming as well). The way back was so much easier – I just tried to follow my very very very winding trail and got home just fine, in some ten minutes (as opposed to 20 minutes I needed to get to school, and it’s not even a kilometre away – had I known it beforehand we would have walked and gotten there much faster).
We have to go to a nearby town of Koknese to buy “supplies” for Ralph’s birthday tomorrow (oh my God, he’s almost eight! I need a new baby so badly!) I hope Arthur will be much better than I in these conditions (a note to myself – I absolutely must find some guidelines on when to use “me” and when “I”. I remember at school having been taught a rhyme that went a little bit like this: “Me no money, me no care, me go marry millionaire. If he die, me no cry, me go find another guy.” But for the life of me I don’t remember any rules about the correct form of this most personal pronoun. Foreign languages, huh.)
And just writing this I see a crazy blizzard outside my window. How are we ever going to get anywhere…
I do not believe there is any sweet that is easier and faster to make than sugar candy which in Latvian is called “cukurgailītis”, literally “sugar rooster”. For it is always in the shape of a cockerel. I tried to find “sugar cock” on Google but for some reason all I got were some naughty pictures. So you’ll have to believe me on this one – the Latvian (and basically all soviet) hard sugar candy comes in this shape:
It’s sold in stores and always readily available in fairs and festivals, it’s a very traditional sweet here. ‘
When a child reaches a certain age when he/she can comfortably reach above a gas stove – which is about 7-8 years old, he/she is basically ready to make the most basic sugar candy of all. You take a steel tablespoon, fill it with sugar (don’t heap), add a couple of drops of water, so the sugar gets wet and doesn’t burn. Then you hold the soon above an open flame until the water evaporates and the sugar gradually gets brown. You rapidly pour the sugar into any bowl or pot or anything with cold water, and, voila, you’ve got hard sugar candy. Here are some very comprehensible pictures.
More often than not you are left with a blackened spoon, sugar high and an angry mom. I have to confess my kids are quite addicted to sugar, especially Ralph, and I can’t be the bad cop all the time, so I give him something sweet every day and try to make sure that it’s something home-made. Sure, this sugar candy is basically pure sugar. It in no way helps their teeth and moods, but at least I can be absolutely sure there are no chemical additives etc. So yesterday was one of those days when the kids got completely out of hand and literally demanded “something sweet.”
I went about it as follows. First you take a metal jug, pot or whatever of a nice, manageable size. You pour some sugar in – depending on how much candy you want. I had about 250 grams (a bit over half a pound). Then you add water – not a lot of water, mind you. Just so it wets the sugar. The more water you’ll add the longer it will take to evaporate. Place it on the stove. Make sure the pot is not too full because when the sugar solution starts boiling it tends to run over, and caramel ir quite hard to clean once it dries and sticks to a surface. (You can see it ran over on my stove as well.)
Then you take any small molds that are suited for high temperatures. I took a risk – I had two molds for freezing that were completely hopeless for freezing because you couldn’t possibly get any frozen yoghurt/milk/water out of them. And I took my beloved silicon chocolate molds that I felt pretty apprehensive about. The label said – up to 230 degrees C, but I have no idea how hot is boiling caramel, I just know it’s very hot and quite dangerous as it cools so slowly. I rubbed both molds with plain vegetable oil. I’m sure you can get some oil spray for such purposes but I’ve never seen any in Latvian stores and I wouldn’t waste money even if it were available. Common cooking oil suits me just fine. (And I used common fingers to spread the oil.)
Prepare some lollipop/ice cream sticks you’ve saved up or even toothpicks (they don’t work as well, I’ve got to tell you – they tend to break and are too sharp for smaller children). Don’t make the mistake that I made – don’t use some plastic counting sticks or food sticks because they might melt in the hot sugar. Here’s proof.
When the sugar turns pleasantly brown and you can feel a heavenly sugery caramel smell it’s time to pour it into the molds. I hurried to get the sticks in but they would not stay upright. The more children stirred the candy in the molds trying to get the sticks stand upright the more brittle and crumbly the end result was.
It takes some time for the sugar to harden and cool. If the kids are going crazy and impatient you can carefully place the molds into a plugged sink with cold water. It speeds up the process. Don’t try to get the candy out before it’s completely cooled.
Quite accidentally the kids discovered for a very short period of time you can make gossamer threads out of sugary mass. So much fun, eating the “candy hair”! You just pick and pull.
When the candy has cooled you can carefully remove it. The yellow molds were a bit of a challenge – and I know I would never have gotten it out if I hadn’t oiled them. The brown mold worked perfectly. Pretty!
We wrapped them in plain food wrap film and put in a cookie tin “for later”. The kids estimated they would have enough for a wee. That was yesterday. I only hope they’ll have some left for tomorrow.
Mmmm…. Home-made candy…
Now I’ll never hear the end of it. Whenever I’ll have no sweets for them they’ll make me make it.
Warning: you have to be Very Careful when handling boiling sugar! Wikipedia claims sugar reaches the temperature of 170 degrees C (338 F) for the caramel stage! You don’t need a themometer for this project, but do take extra special care and ask the kids to step away when YOU pour the caramel into molds.
Hey, it’s been a whole month since I posted pictures of new mittens!
These ones will be the last of this winter, I hope. I knitted them a bit loose so they would fit the boys next year as well. They chose the animals themselves. The thin and tall cats are for Ralph, and the others that look like dogs are actually Arctic foxes for Walter.
So today was the day when I decided to introduce my unsuspecting children to geography. I had recently heard them talk about “Spain, Africa, Mengele (our hometown, nay, not even a town, a settlement. A hamlet, if you will) and other such cities”.
When I see something that must be amended, I mend it without hesitation. Just something teacherish about me, you know. No wonder I never did get that degree in paedagody (not for lack of trying. Although… if you think about it really long and hard, that’s exactly why – for lack of trying). For who can go through five years of university secretly believing they are “above it all”, a know-it-all. (The actual reason for leaving was my pregnancy and the birth of Ralph, while the reason for not returning to teaching studies was just that – I felt that this kind of education was not what I needed and opted fr psychology instead. Now that’s something that every person needs, right? Some intense navel-gazing and new-found smugness of unprecedented levels.)
So today I set out to teach my children geography. After all, it is indeed exciting. Continents. (Rhymes with continence – something the elder has almost grasped while the youngest still ever so often prefers just to “let it go” instead of going downstairs at night, asleep, to pee.) Oceans. Mountains. And so on.
This time I wanted to focus on much more interesting and fascinating things. Things that are not things at all. Things that are animals. Mammals mostly. So I made five pages with animal pictures (no sources noted, just some random clipart from the google – I hope I won’t get into trouble). I started with Africa, then moved on to Antarctica and Arctic Ocean and then… by that time my patience and excitement had all run out, and I left both Americas with some measly alligators and crocodiles, and left Europe (where we live!!!) completely desolate and void of any life forms. But by that time (three full hours had passed not counting the hours I spent researching animals, selecting pictures and preparing printables) we were quite fed up with the whole thing that just wanted to have it done.
So I hope my kids got the message. There are six continents. Africa ir hopelessly crowded, the animals are forced to live in the water outside the continent. Australia is incredibly incredible. Antarctica is rather boring, having little as apart from penguins. Asia is OK, Americas are dangerous, and Europe is all cities, art, museums, banks and schools.
What is your take on the world geograhy? Anyone feeling offended by our map? Anyone else left college during the last year with a smug conviction that you know better?
{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
Inspired by Soulemama.
