Although I’ve kept herbs and occasional greens growing next to the deck, I haven’t grown a proper garden since (checks blog archives… ) 2008. That must have been the point at which the water line broke, and I started taking
Done?
Are we done raising children? It almost feels like it. This is the third year with all three older kids living and working far from home. Fiona turned 16 this week and is incredibly self-sufficient, living 90 minutes from home.
My big kid’s big job
Erin was poised to finish her Masters in Violin Performance at New England Conservatory this past May. We anticipated that she would eventually land a full-time orchestra position, but the classical music world being what it is, we knew that
Spinning
I bought a little spinning wheel. It’s about the size of an SLR camera and weighs a fraction as much. It came from a Kickstarter campaign I backed. I paid about $50 and like my other favourite Kickstarter reward, it
Food management complexity
Honestly, I feel like my life is primarily about food management these days. I have one family member who goes to school five days a week and dances six days a week and who therefore needs eleven proper meals a
Second year of school
Fiona has begun Grade 11 at the big mainstream school in Nelson. Compared to the scheduling chaos of last year, her first year in school, it has been a very smooth start. She likes being back at the routine. She
Mountain Goat Hike
We continued our end-of-summer alpine hiking tradition as best we could this year. Instead of four or three of us female members of the family, we only had two of us. Sophie spent the summer train-hopping, road-tripping to the States, launching
First year of school
Fiona finished her first year of school, Grade 10, just over a week ago. Over the previous three years she had taken two core courses (math and science) and two short electives (Spanish and dance) at our local village school, but this
Raising teens in a digital world
When it comes to teens’ use of technology, I feel strongly that we should listen to what the experts have to say. Recently I’ve waded into several threads on social media about youth and digital media. One was sparked by
Post-asbestos progress
It set us back about three weeks and cost a lot of money, but the asbestos is gone, and the renovation is moving ahead again. First the roof came off. Then it poured rain all weekend. Of course. There were
First school term
Fiona has reached the end of the first term of the first semester of her first year fully enrolled in school. She has a part-time course load, with just three out of four time-slots filled. She is taking Art 11,
HazMat Adventures
Our Nelson place is the eyesore on the block. We bought it because of that. It was affordable and well situated, and that created the possibility of bringing it up to neighbourhood standards and eventually reselling it for a price more
My friend in Nairobi
Almost a year ago I attended a meeting of local New Denverites who were interested in the idea of sponsoring a refugee family. Out of that meeting, the Slocan Valley Refugee Coalition formed. We opened a bank account and started fund-raising
Physics is hard
Fiona has now been in high school for two weeks. It feels like a month! In both a bad way and a good way. Her life has been so crazy full that it feels like a month must have passed for all
A new year: school
It’s been not entirely smooth, Fiona’s entry into mainstream bricks-and-mortar schooling. For those who have been keeping track, Fiona got her first tastes of regular schooling at our tiny local K-12 school. By tiny, I mean tiny. The high school