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Home project: kids’ art display center

Our two 5YOs are quite the budding artists. The sheer volume of work they produce on a daily basis is astounding. And it’s not limited to scribbling with crayons, no, not for these children of an art teacher. They use real art supplies, and create 3D as well as 2D projects. We desperately needed to expand our “on the fridge” display operation, but didn’t feel like filling the walls with holes.  I saw these picture ledges at Ikea and had an idea:

Ikea hack: kids' art display shelf

The idea here is that we can display 3D art on top of the slim shelves, while also hanging 2D pieces from the wires/clips. I don’t know if I’d call this an Ikea “hack” insofar as we are still using it for its intended purpose. However, adding the wires to the bottom of the shelves doubled the functionality of the display shelf. (There we go with stacking functions again!)

Interested? For each shelf, you’ll need:

1 Ikea “Ribba” picture ledge, 45″ ($14.99)
1 Ikea “Dignitet” wire curtain rod ($12.99)
1 set Ikea “Deka” curtain wire clips ($6.99)

Mount the curtain rod brackets to the bottom of the shelf. Adam had to make a special trip to the hardware store to get the right size screws. Attach the wire. Attach the clips. Done! Total cost per shelf: $35. You could do this cheaper if you bought the lumber, screwed it together, and painted it, but… we decided to go with the easy route.


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Cargo bike!

Finally, my Christmas wish from 2009 has come true. We are the proud new owners of a Sun Atlas cargo bike! Here’s Adam and the kids riding it home from the farmers market last weekend:

Why a cargo bike? Well, the kids outgrew their baby carriage and I needed a way to get them to preschool in the mornings this fall.

Why the Sun Atlas? Price was the deciding factor — it’s among the most affordable complete cargo bikes we’ve seen, and we’ve been shopping around for a long time.  We looked at Xtracycle, Yuba Mundo, an Electra Townie with Xtracycle FreeRadical add-on (which was affordable but uncomfortable), and we also even fantasized about the Big Dummy or (be still my Dutch heart) a bak fiet.  But our tight budget won out in the end, and we went with this very comfortable, affordable, versatile solution.

The other thing was this: I’m four inches taller than Adam, and in order to justify spending this kind of dough on a bike we wanted to be able to share it.  That meant a frame that was made for sharing — the seat is easy to adjust and at an angle such that it moves farther away from the handlebars the higher you raise it, making on-the-fly adjustments easy.

So enter the Sun Atlas, which we were lucky enough to be able to test ride — both of us — and buy at Varsity Bikes in dinkytown.  This bike is no Big Dummy; many of the components are a bit on the cheap side: the center kick-stand, for example.  But Adam’s a pro at finding gently used bike parts on eBay so we should have no problem swapping out various components as that becomes necessary.  The frame and the wheelset are the most important things right now, and they rock!

Here’s how we customized it for four-year-old twin transport:

mountain bike bar ends - or foot pegs

First, Adam picked up two sets of mountain bike bar ends from the salvage bin at the Hub to attach for foot pegs, so the kids’ feet wouldn’t just be hanging there.  Here’s how the look on: (with princess shoes of course)

However, their heels were still dangerously close, at times, to those spinning spokes, so we also decided to go for it and get the Xtracycle bags. The Sun Atlas is made to be compatible with most Xtracycle accessories. They’re not necessary for hauling kids, obviously, but they’ll make the bike much more useful in the long run.

Here was our solution for something to hold on to:

Stem from the Hub salvage yard, and an inexpensive set of handlebars and grips, considerably cheaper than the Xtracycle “stoker bar.”

Finally, we did a bit of sewing — a bit of colorful canvas and some foam from the fabric store and we had a nice little pad for the kids to sit on.  ALL SET!

Sun Atlas Cargo bike

The first couple times we took this out the kids were a little nervous, but now… well now they barely even hang on and I have to warn them when we’re about to go over potholes.  Anneke sits in front and holds on to the handlebars and Rowan usually just holds on to the bar under the pad.

This thing is A BLAST to ride. Much easier than pulling the baby carriage, even with 75 lbs of kids on the back.  And the basket that Adam bought me for my birthday last year fits perfectly on the front! This bike is the bees’ knees.  It was worth the wait!


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What can we eat NOW?

Last weekend I did my annual Memorial Day phenology photo shoot in the garden. Phenology is the science of tracking when, for example, the daffodils first bloom in a certain location.  It’s becoming a very important science for documenting climate change.

Beginning gardeners are often disappointed by how long it takes to finally have something to eat — tomatoes and peppers don’t produce much until late July, if you’re lucky.  So what are some things we can grow that will give us early eats?  Look to edible perennials in the landscape, my friends.  Let’s take a tour of some of the goodness we’re already enjoying in late May in Minnesota.

Asparagus and strawberries. The asparagus seeded out a couple weeks ago — the plants are finally mature enough that next year we should be able to harvest some. Boy, it’s been a long wait. Strawberries should be ripe in 7-10 days, and new anti-rabbit netting seems to be helping.

Dill. It’s needed thinning several times anyway, so I’ve been adding the tiny plants to salads and dressings.  Dill is not technically a perennial, but it re-seeds itself.  In great numbers.  Plant it once and you’ll always have it.  Everywhere.

Lettuce and radishes! YES! We need to eat these up as fast as we can because the forecast for this week is hot.

Left to right: oregano, garlic, and chives (dying tulips in the background). Chives were one of the first things that came up when the snow cleared out — we’ve been eating them since late April.  I’ve also dried some oregano. Garlic scapes will pop up in the next two weeks.

Chive flowers, which are also an interesting addition to salads. I prefer to eat them before they open, though.  It’s a texture issue.

The kids with their first harvest of lettuce and radishes from their gardens (in the background). I’ve read that involving kids with gardening can encourage them to eat more vegetables, but seeing it with my own eyes has been freaking awesome.  My almost-4-year-olds, picking radishes, brushing off the dirt, and eating them while jumping on their trampolines.  Strange but fun.

 


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Plans vs. Reality

Well over a year ago, I came up with a genius plan to rip out our two front hallway closets and part of a wall in order to custom-build some beautiful built-in cubbies with a nice bench and room for boots underneath,like this.   I realized recently that we are a few years from having the time or money to take on a project of that magnitude, so I compromised.  Here’s what we came up with to better-organize the area by our back door, which is the one we use most of the time.

Before: a rickety old laundry-drying rack holds lots of wet snowpants and jackets.  Also note the pile of shoes and boots and lack of rugs.

After: Adam stained up a couple of oak boards that were lying around in the garage and attached hooks.  I looked around for a week or two on Craigslist trying to find a bench that would work, but it just wasn’t happening so I went to Ikea.  This bench (from the bathroom department) is absolutely perfect for our needs.  This corner isn’t quite the beautiful, built-in oak system I dreamed of, but it will definitely get us by until we have a little more time/money for such projects.

Added bonus: the kids love hanging up their coats and snowpants on their very own hooks.  Also: I purposely picked small, cheap rugs because our dog absolutely LOVES to throw up on rugs.  These can easily be thrown in the wash.


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Book review: Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
By Neil Postman
Published 1984

A while back, I saw a very well-drawn cartoon explaining, in a nutshell, the thesis of this book.  It contrasts George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s visions of the future, and concludes that Huxley was more accurate.  The cartoon really spoke to me.  It wasn’t until after I’d added the book to my library queue that I realized it had been published over 15 years ago.

What ended up being most interesting about this book was trying to imagine how and whether what Postman says applies to the internet, since he wrote at a time when culture was dominated by television.  We are already shifting away from TV, though the shift is still in its infancy.  So is this new shift an improvement or are we even worse off, in Postman’s worldview?  Well, he passed away in 2003, so it would have been hard for him to see exactly where the internet was going, culturally speaking.  Hell, we still can’t.

Did this book speak to me as much as the cartoon did? See for yourself:

Postman divides the book into two parts: the first is a history of the influence of media on culture and the rise of print and photography.  The second explores a culture steeped in television: 1980s America.

An interesting anecdote in Part I is that of a Revolutionary War-era religious group called The Dunkers. Postman came across their story in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Franklin had suggested to his Dunker friend that they ought to write down the tenets of their beliefs, and they responded that they didn’t feel comfortable putting anything in writing because they didn’t want their descendants to be “bound and confined” by it, in case God chose to reveal more truths as time went on.  Taking specific measures to ensure openness to future ideas: wow.

Postman also explores colonial America’s dedication to education of every child, and how that widespread literacy shaped our early culture.  Examples: the volume of books being sold in the US was astounding, and attention spans were downright shocking (he cites one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which lasted SEVEN HOURS).

On to part II: the age of showbusiness, or 1980s America.  I did snicker at some of his criticisms, e.g. the “rapid-fire editing” on Sesame Street.  Yet, Postman pointed out several things which are still definitely true today.

Firstly, he points out the difficulty people have in discerning truth on televised programming, and how it forces us to rely instead on the credibility of the person on television.

This is a matter of considerable importance, for it goes beyond the question of how truth is perceived on television news shows.  If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate  a sense of verisimilitude.

You can just picture Postman watching Reagan on TV, then writing that sentence, can’t you?

He dedicates chapters to things that are now clichés, such as televangelists and pundits who confuse emotion with informed opinion.  But there are also some zingers, like his assertion that television commercials attack capitalism itself:

…the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists…believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well-informed, and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest.  If greed was to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, then surely rationality was the driver.

Anyone who’s worked in marketing (or watched Mad Men) can see the problem here: modern advertising is wholly based on emotion, not reason.  And, at least in the 1980s, the television commercial was the pinnacle of this trend (which started in the early 1900s).

As a parent, I am very concerned about all this.  And for us that has translated into limiting the amount of screen-time our children get (see my review of Simplicity Parenting for more on that).  Postman explains well why this is important:

… we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show.

Right now my kids can and should be kids — exploring, playing, learning, and discovering things on their own, rather than being passive receptors of one narrow kind of information.  I am not 100% anti-T.V.  We have Netflix, and watch DVDs several times a week (we’re a little behind on streaming still with our old power-PC Macs).

My challenge to you:  go DVD/DVR/Netflix streaming/whatever-only for one month.  Then try to watch a regular show on one of the networks.  You will not be able to stand the constant commercial interruption.  It’s become unbearable for me to watch regular TV now, and that’s just the way I like it because it’s a great way to control how much I watch–those three days waiting for the new disc to arrive are spent doing other things.  (Crap, how will I control myself if/when we upgrade and can finally use Watch Instantly?)

Postman is careful not to totally demonize TV, though, but to simply point out that, as high-minded as some TV tries to be, the message is limited by the medium.  Television demands interesting pictures, and simple explanations.  And shows that try to rise above the tumult and include actual thoughtful exposition fail, because the medium simply was not designed for it.  And that’s OK, but only as long as we are all aware of it.

So what are we thoughtful readers to do?  Postman:

What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested as well… He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

Education.  There you have it.  And you all know where that starts.

The bigger question: how does all of this apply to a culture which is now shifting from TV to the internet?  My gut instinct is that some things are better and others are worse, but that the internet is somehow going to end up being this strange mash-up of print and television, hopefully eventually becoming more like the best of both worlds, instead of the worst.  Only time will tell.


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A mac & cheese alternative

Problem: 2-year-old twins, when given boxed macaroni and cheese about once per week, become COMPLETELY OBSESSED with macaroni and don’t want to eat anything else.

Solution: Stop buying the boxed macaroni.  When desperation hits, cook up some pasta.  Toss it with some olive oil, sun dried tomatoes, a little parmesan cheese, garlic, and/or whatever you like and have on hand.  Or you could get fancy and make your own cheese sauce from scratch.  It’s maybe not the healthiest meal ever, but it’s not as processed, and they like it just fine.  (But they don’t like it so much that they obsess over it.  Is it the lack of cartoon characters?  I don’t know.)


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What I’m reading right now

A couple things that I read today:

10 simple truths about raising healthy eaters
And one of the ten is give them raw milk!  Alas that I have no access to it.  Does anyone know a source of raw milk in the Twin Cities metro area?  The rest of the nine “truths” are mostly very simple ones, such as: kids will eventually eat their vegetables — if they see you eating your vegetables.

Gardening is EXPLODING in popularity
New research from the National Gardening Association shows that:

“Seven million more households plan to grow their own fruits, vegetables, herbs, or berries in 2009 than in 2008 — a 19 percent increase in participation.”

The full report is a pdf; click here to download it.

Coming soon: spray-on liquid glass
I have no idea what to make of this.  I’ll pull the same quote that Jason Kottke did:

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

Here’s the rest.  One of the things I love about glass is how endlessly and easily recyclable it is (unlike plastic).  I’m sure there’s a horrible downside to this that I’m not thinking of, though?


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Book Review: Simplicity Parenting

Simplicity Parenting
Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and more Secure Kids
by Kim John Payne
& Lisa M. Ross

Here’s another book that is not overtly related to home economics at first glance.  But I found a lot to chew on here.

The premise of the book is this: by simplifying our childrens’ environment, we slow down their childhood to allow for the “essential unfolding of self… of identity, well-being, and resiliency.”

How to do this?  Payne recommends four areas of our modern lives that need to be examined: Environment, Rhythm, Schedules, and Filtering out the Adult World. Let’s look at each one individually.

Environment
Providing children with endless choices, endless sensory stimulation, is actually harming them by making them feel [sometimes] overwhelmed and [sometimes] entitled.  The fix?  Reduce the number of toys in your house.  Not just by half.  Most families, Payne asserts, can reduce their numbers by at least 75% before the kids will even notice.  He also provides a 10-step-guide to you, the parent, in deciding which toys to keep.

But he also recommends simplifying their wardrobes, and even simplifying your home.  I bet you can see where this is going, but he saves “screen-time” issues for part four.

Rhythm
Creating predictable rhythms and routines that kids can count on increases their sense of security and well-being.  One example of this is creating rhythms around simple, healthy foods.  He gives a creative reason for avoiding junk food: aside from the obvious health implications, giving a child “big-hit” flavors such as Doritoes, on a daily basis, can skew their perspective on what normal food ought to taste like.

My favorite idea from this section was creating one or two predictable food nights per week, for example, Friday Night Pizza, or Wednesday Night Soup.  If you’re a person who feels anxiety around meal-planning, you might even extend it to five nights a week.   Adam grew up with Sunday Night Tacos at his house.  It’s  something simple for the whole family to plan on.

Schedules
Here’s another thing we all know is out of control: too many scheduled activities.  In his private practice, Payne likes to write a prescription for parents who overschedule their kids: “Boredom.  To be allowed three times a day, preferably before meals.”

Payne calls boredom a gift, and not just because it forces kids to come up with creative ways to entertain themselves.  In the short term, yes, this is a benefit.  But over the long term (and this was where, for me, the book started getting really interesting), boredom gives us another gift that he feels is missing from many kids’ lives: anticipation.

“When we open up our child’s schedules we make room for anticipation. Just as it’s hard to cherish a toy that’s buried in the middle of a pile, it is hard to anticipate something when we’re always busy, or when we’re trying to do everything now … Anticipating gratification, rather than expecting or demanding it, strengthens a child’s will.  Impulsivity, wanting everything now, leaves the will weak….”

He even goes so far as to say that too much activity — too much planned, scheduled, directed activity — can create a reliance on outer stimulation, a culture of compulsion and instant gratification; i.e. addictive behaviors.

Whoa.  Hold on there.  So signing my kid up for soccer after school means they’re going to grow up to be some kind of addict?  Nah.  He is making a point:  downtime is good for a kid.  And frankly, it’s good for parents too.  Frees up more time for you to bake bread!

He also talks a bit about how youth sports have changed, and admonishes parents who want their kid to be the next Tiger Woods: emotional intelligence should top our list of hopes and dreams for our children.

Filtering Out the Adult World
You knew this was coming, right?  Payne’s final section revolves around limiting a child’s screen time.  But he wants parents to cut back too, and for good reason: worry is now defining daily life for many parents, driving them to helicopter around their kids in fear of both real and perceived dangers.  And kids feed off those emotions.

He also warns against “too much information” — for example, maybe your small children don’t need to know many details about global warming.  Payne asks, “do you love the times you live in?”  For me, honestly, the answer is often no.  Do I need to complain about politics or other adult concerns incessantly in front of my kids?  Definitely not.

My favorite bit of advice in the entire book was this:

“When your children are young, let the world of doing be their domain.”

We already follow a good bit of the advice in this book with our own kids — to me it just makes sense.  It was also how both Adam and I were raised, at least to some extent.  Here’s the thing though:  it’s super easy to do this now, when they haven’t gone off to school yet, or even daycare (we have a nanny when Adam is at work).  Outside influences are limited in our lives right now.

All of these suggestions are probably much harder when you have school-age children.  But I don’t think that Payne is suggesting that everyone follow all of this perfectly, step-by-step.  In his private practice, he does some radical transformations with families who are having lots of problems (I picture a minimalist version of SuperNanny).  Some of the anecdotes in the book are pretty powerful.  But for most of us, we can pick and choose which areas of our family life need the most help, and concentrate on them.

If this stuff interests you, there are some excerpts from the book and other information on Payne’s website, SimplicityParenting.com.

So I guess I’ll have to think twice before I enroll the kids in the Junior Master Gardener program…


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Getting organized

This happens to me every year in January — I want to throw out everything and simplify my life.  This year, in addition to my Master Gardener classes, work, and baking bread like a maniac, I’m also reading a parenting book.  I haven’t read one since the kids were born, so it was about time.  The book is Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne.

I’m only about 1/3 of the way in, but one of his recommendations is to dramatically reduce the number of toys in your household.  We don’t have excessive numbers of toys, but I still did manage to get rid of one very large box.  Then I organized the remaining toys in fabric bins from Target — we’ve been using them for a long time because they fit so perfectly on our bookshelf.

The bins were a bit disorganized, so this weekend I dusted off the sewing machine and cut up some old jeans and made these simple labels for them:

I just sewed around the edges and will let the denim get a natural fringe over time.  Adam drew the little pictures with a Sharpie. (Hey, it’s minimalist crafting!) Then I safety-pinned the labels on the boxes — that way if we change things up later they will be easy to remove.  These labels aren’t perfect — the “cars” one has all their four-wheeled vehicles in it, and the Barbie one also has ponies in it, but we tried to keep it as simple as possible.  We did need two whole bins for dress-up clothes:

Wouldn’t Amanda Soule be proud of me right now?  I’d like to think so…  And I will definitely post a review of the book when I finish it.