The Slow Death of Tradition

The other day I caught myself purchasing two of these Easter Egg coloring kits, to do with my friends' kids and Terry's niece and nephew. Somehow, I didn't feel good about buying them, because I thought to myself, back in the day we would have been able to do this without pressed color tablets and tacky run of the mill stickers. It made me sad, because I realized we've gotten to the point where it has become too much work to teach a kid how to hold a paintbrush, mix some paint and be creative on their own, instead of slapping a sticker on something and calling it their own. Nowadays, we can't be bothered to take the time to remember, to teach and to pass along things that our grandma's and grandpa's taught us, showed us and made it a point to not forget these activities.

But then when you think about all the traditions, customs and preparations for holidays and birthdays that our generation still grew up with, handed down from grandparents and parents, lovingly preserved,
--they are slowly fading in the background, and being forgotten.

Easter for example, in my family, we observed lent, I wasn't allowed to have candy or sweets during that time. When I asked for it at the store anyway, my mom promised me that the money we would have spent on the candy will go in the pop-up collection piggy-bank that would be brought to church on Easter as a donation for Africa and other causes. Usually the collecting for a good cause ended up being much more fun and more fulfilling than candy, especially, come Easter I would get my fill with Chocolate anyhow. The heavier and fuller the piggy-bank was on Easter, when it was time to deliver it to church, the more proud of my accomplishment I was. Me and the other kids at church usually played the game of holding up and weighing each other's piggy-banks and marveled at the weight of our collections, being extra proud when yours was heavier than everyone else's.

At home, we blew out the Easter eggs, often weeks in advance as they were needed in the household to avoid waste and collected them to then paint and decorate them. The whole family participated, at least the artistically inclined parts of it. And even as a little child, you learned to respect and not to break the fragile egg-shell that was to be painted. I still have Easter eggs today, that my grandpa painted with rabbits and Easter baskets on them. We would then go out and either collect from our yard or buy, branches to hang the Easter eggs from, and put them in a large vase until it all made up a colorfully decorated Easter bouquet.

Today, I think many kids don't have the patience or the ability anymore to deal with delicate things, to focus and to make them into something. I think the media-and toy-overload we can observe in many households today, not only make it obsolete to make stuff and pass the time that way, it becomes a chore for kids to craft, create and build. For me, this is almost an argument for having kids, even though I have many reservations about it, just to pass on a more natural, simple way of life, like I was lucky enough to be brought up with.

Call me old-fashioned and melancholic, but I sit here and I feel the weight on my shoulders, knowing that if my generation does not keep up with these traditions and customs, they will be gone forever, when we're gone. Already, the next generation, will never know or remember a lot of the intricacies, preparations and procedures that went into preparing for many holidays and events back then, and the next thing you know, kids will be coloring virtual eggs on their ipads. It's a sad thought to me.

Sometimes I think I missed my calling. I should probably have been a historian or librarian or kindergarten teacher or some kind of craft book writer. Probably the latter, considering that I'm actually not a big fan of kids, but strangely, I'm a huge fan of kids activities, like arts and crafts and projects. I don't know what to do with that seemingly "useless" knowledge of how to make and create things. I always thought I'd have a career in something artsy, and then went for business instead in college, leaving me to feel today, like I completely missed the mark.

To my readers: I am planning to collect many of the traditions, holiday preparations and customs, to maybe one day preserve them in a book about the subject. Please help me do that. Write down a memory or a craft or whatever it may be that you remember about a holiday preparations in your house, either in the comments, or write to me on facebook or in an email, so I can collect them, along with my own and hopefully do something with them, in order to preserve some of these great customs.  I would really appreciate your input and maybe learn something new.

Reduce! Re-use! Rejoice!!

We recently bought a small townhouse here in West Palm Beach. As you know from my previous posts, we enjoy immensely that we now have a small yard and more room for storage, more room for the doggie to run, and also, finally, a second bedroom. Even though the house has been upgraded and renovated before we moved in, there are still, as you probably know if you're a homeowner, a-million-and-one things you would like to change, personalize or just simply improve. Some improvements are on the costly side, some you can do on the cheap, all of them usually include a lot of elbow-grease, time-spent and many are often involved with a thorough backache that manifests the day after said improvement, or --as in Terry's case, headaches, brought on by the mere mention of the wiring that is going on in this house!

So, considering that after the house-purchase and the purchase of necessary furniture items, the budget is significantly depleted, I've started to take a closer look at what I already have, to see, if anything could be re-used, re-purposed or spruced up. I have to say I was quite surprised by what I found.

I looked at our old couch. This was my two-seater, which I purchased in Boston, when I had a single-gal city-apartment approximately the size of a postage stamp. I moved this couch from Boston to Florida, to Memphis and back to Florida. I almost didn't want to bring it along on this last move from the apartment to the new house, but Terry and I decided that it sort of had a sentimental value after many years of us cramping ourselves on this tiny little mud-green couch. So we dragged it along. "The guest room maybe" we said, and just chucked it in there with all the other items left over from our effort to make this our "grown-up" house.

After all odds and ends had settled in the guest room, which felt more like Tut-anch-amun's burial chamber, when I first tried to clean it up, I took another look at the sofa. Right next to it stood the mattress that we had just chucked in there after buying a new one for the master bedroom. Hmm, I thought, if we put the actual mattress on the pull-out sofa, this could be a guest bed for the time being. No need to buy a new one. I tried it, it fit. Nice. Now, the only issue is, all my bedding from former master bedrooms was in various shades of blue, ranging from baby to navy, nothing that really matched the fabulous mud-green exterior of the couch. HMMM.

I looked at it for a few days and finally put on a set of mostly neutral beige sheets and started attaching the wall art from our old living room. The Florida type stuff, a yellow and green ancient map-style picture with palm trees that matched my very "eclectic" yellow, brown and green polka dot recliner (like I said, this room is a collection of the pre-grown up stuff), which now rests next to the make-shift bed. When all that was there, my wonderful and thrifty friend Anna showed up with a lamp for me. A hand-me down that I was more than happy to accept considering the lack of light fixtures in the guest room. It was missing the lamp-shade, but it was an acceptable start for the moment.

That same day Terry, surprisingly, came home with two rolls of high quality tan/neutral-colored fabric from the store next door. Apparently the upholstery shop was getting rid of some out-of-style fabrics that they didn't need anymore. He thought maybe I could do something with it. Thinking about the neutral sheets I put on the bed, I immediately thought that this fabric would make nice shear curtains. HMMM again. So I went on Pinterest to find myself some ideas. I recommend it to everybody, that site is a bottomless pit of creativity and many, many of these ideas you'll find, are very easy to reproduce. Check it out some time. To the right is my inspiration that I used from Pinterest, which then led to my curtains.

I bought one of these little hand-operated sewing machines for $10  and went to work. Now remember, you don't have to be an expert. Have you seen some of the stuff that you buy from China? Those curtains are not particularly well sewn either!! Nor do they have to be. Also, if you don't want to try yourself in sewing, find an old bed sheet, tablecloth anything that is in one piece and already sewn. Works just as well. Imagination is key!! How often do you move/ mess with curtains? Never! So even if they're uneven, as long as you can get them up there on the curtain rod in one piece and leave them there. Good! That's all you need.

So I sewed two panels for myself. Rifled through my crafts stuff and found skinny brown ribbons, remembered that I had two old brown curtain panels from years ago and ironed them up, found my cheap, old curtain rods, dug up old picture frames and made simple stamp pictures that every 3 year old could make.

Et voila. Here is the result of almost no expenses and all imagination and re-purposing (I went with the lightest blue comforter that I had and re-incorporated that color in some wall art to match it and repeat the color). While these are not the colors I would choose to go together, strangely enough, they do kind of go together now. It now looks like a cozy little room that is perfectly acceptable and even cute as a guest room.



Dollars spent: $12 (ten on the sewing machine and $1 each for round ornamental stamp and stamp pad baby-blue in the $1 section at the craft store.

As the cherry on top, my friend Anna showed up with a lampshade just a little bit later, which she intercepted from meeting its pre-mature demise when a neighbor moved out and wanted to chuck it in the dumpster.

As a positive side effect I can feel good about the fact that everything I did in that room, came from re-used products that I already had, no unnecessary spending, no garbage in a landfill and no waste. Challenge yourself to re-use and re-purpose, it is fun, it is a project and so much better for the environment, not to mention, waaay more satisfying than just spending money and getting new stuff.

At the end of the day, as crooked as the sewing may be, I MADE those curtains. If nothing else, its a conversation piece.




P.S. I added some handy new gadgets to the blog. You can now subscribe via email, in case you enjoy this little page of mine, that way you won't miss a post. Also, I added a little poll to find out more about my readers and when they enjoy their social media/reading/ blog-time. Feel free to add your comments, votes and suggestions and thank you for stopping by.

Me Teaching? Teaching whom what?

So, I am really nervous.  I just recently accepted a small tutoring gig. Yes, that is ME, tutoring an actual PERSON, well, a small person --an 8 year-old in Reading/Language Arts. This worries me a bit, can't imagine how much this worries the parents, who seem to think I got this down pad.
Well I've always been great in English, (at this point, better even than my own native German language), I worked for a publisher and helped project-manage and edit school books that are now used in most American schools across the country. Technically I shouldn't fret about this too much. But unfortunately I do, I worry, probably for the same reason I don't have my own kids. What if I screw this up? If I do, then there is a little screwed up person running around and it will be my fault. On the other hand I am very much known to be a worry-er and also very much known for the fact that 99.9 % of the time this worry is unfounded. So given my worry's track record, I should totally be fine.

I worried so much that I felt compelled to pretty much go to every website of every accredited Palm Beach County School and did research on what they are reading, what they are reading for extra credit, what a second grader should read, what books are mandatory or recommended reading for second graders, heck I even contacted one of my friends, who works at a children's learning publisher right now, to find out from her what they offer for second graders. After having, for my feeling, sufficiently obsessed about the subject, I went to the library to pick up several books from the list that I compiled, which by now has some 40 titles on it.

I came home with waaay too many books for one lesson, but figured I'll go ahead and scrutinize these some more so I can then come up with maybe 2 out of the 6 that I grabbed that may pass my "OCD-obsession-with task-at-hand"-Test, before I can continue formulating a lesson plan.

I went ahead and read all the books I brought home, and must admit, the stuff a second-grader has to understand and deal with, is really quite impressive. I found a new appreciation for the fact, that these kids really have to know a lot at their age of 7 or 8. I finally concluded, that my story of choice will be The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks by Scholastic. I like it because it combines reading with everyday and science knowledge, which felt like a double-whammy to me. Learning about different subject matter, while learning to read. Great idea. So I went ahead and wrote out questions about the story, checked and double checked myself wondering if I'm making this too easy or too hard, did some vocabulary side work that will be useful for the story and figured I would observe her when she reads to identify rough spots and difficulties. The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book about How Living Things Grow (Google Affiliate Ad)

I wondered what I was going to do to hold a child's attention for a whole hour, but luckily the Internet, besides containing lots of useless information, is indeed useful for some learning too. I actually found some nice websites, here too, again, Scholastic stood out with their magic school bus website, with word games and activities. I figured, if the kiddo's mind starts to fry from too much reading and comprehending, to give it a break and let it wander...to memory games and word puzzles, that are while related to the subject, I find, a great distraction and means to re-focus the reading-battered second-grader.Scholastic Daily Word Ladders Grades 1-2 (Google Affiliate Ad)

After about a half a day of smoke coming out of the top of my head, (yeah, this stuff is hard!!!), I came up with a story to read, ten questions related to the story to test comprehension, attention and memory,  and two or three opinion related questions, all to be answered in full sentences, two word games and another backup story in case i have not prepared enough material, here I am, ready to go for my first tutoring lesson.

Let's hope this goes well. Wish me luck. With as much as I worried, I don't think there's anything to worry about.

A Pat on the Back...Courtesy of Your Eggplant!

So, for the first time in years really we have our own yard. (I won't even count the huuuge yard we had in Memphis, considering that the number of squirrels that lived there basically nixed my attempt at planting or actually, I think they brought it down to somewhere in the negative, being that on many occasions not even the actual plant survived their attacks, let alone the "fruit")

Anyway, we have a minimal strip of yard at the new house that we turned into something like a container-garden, considering we have a tall wood fence that we decided to "embellish" with herbs and veggies in terra-cotta pots. Now, I love flowers and I grow those also, but there is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment you get from growing your own vegetables and herbs.

It really isn't hard or expensive and I recommend it to anyone, who could use a little pat on his back. There really is no cheaper way to feel accomplished than to buy a $5 tomato plant, sprinkle some miracle gro in the soil and voila.... with a little water and TLC you harvest your own tomatoes in no time  --and boy let me tell you, you've never had any better tomatoes than the ones you have grown yourself. No, that doesn't  mean you have now come up with some magical-extra-better-tasting-hybrid tomato, no it's just the fact that it's yours, it grows in your yard, you made it grow (OK, really the miracle gro did), but still, I swear, try it, you'll agree.

We started small here by Terry planting six herbs, Mint, Oregano, Chives, Basil, Dill and Cilantro. When that was accomplished, we got so excited that we went back, --because why stop there, if we can grow these, why not grow Tomatoes, Eggplant, Jalapenos and Bell Peppers, so we planted those next. Now the real accomplishment was the eggplant, I'm telling you it is so fun to have that veggies out there, to watch them grow, and to groom and nourish them. All that to harvest a single eggplant  -it takes weeks!!! But boy does that eggplant taste better than any store-bought eggplant you ever bought. Again not the magical green thumb, but mostly because it comes with the sense of pride, knowing that this eggplant braved the frequent attacks of the dog, every weather, survived your trip to the keys when you weren't there to water it, and all the other times when you actually did water it, covered it up against the cold and took off the yellowing leaves and made sure it got enough sun and all.

I'm telling you, even sitting in the yard is more fun, when you can marvel at your newly acquired 'mad' gardening-skills, at every blink of the eye. I'm telling you, sitting across from that plump-almost-ready to pick Jalapeno makes you sit just a little bit straighter, smile just a little bit brighter and enjoy your glass of wine just a little bit more, knowing, you planted that.

Funny how that works. I dare you to try it, if you even have a patch of sunny balcony or yard, try it some time.

And to pat myself on the back just a little bit more, I have attached some pictures to prove my gardening prowess!!!