"A Song of Peace"

Thinking about independence day here in the U.S. And thinking about Egypt. And India. And Kenya. And Uganda. And Australia. And France. And Indonesia. And Brazil. And on and on.

And thinking about the Kingdom of God, with a story so much more vast and deep and wide than any nation's story, though it encompasses peoples of every nation and their stories too.

Thinking of "A Song of Peace."

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a prayer that peace transcends in every place;
and yet I pray for my beloved country --
the reassurance of continued grace:
Lord, help us find our one-ness in the Savior,
in spite of differences of age and race. 

May truth and freedom come to every nation;
May peace abound where strife has raged so long;
That each may seek to love and build together,
A world united, righting every wrong;
A world united in its love for freedom,
Proclaiming peace together in one song.

This is my prayer, O Lord of all earth's kingdoms:
Thy kingdom come; on earth thy will be done.
Let Christ be lifted up till all shall serve him,
And hearts united learn to live as one.
O hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations;
Myself I give thee, let thy will be done.

(first stanzas by Lloyd Stone in 1934, last three by Georgia Harkness in 1939

Slow-Cooked Days: Easter Dinner

I heart my slow cooker. I've been using it more and more, enjoying the delicious (and easy, hearty and economical) meals I can cook up in it without much fuss. I especially enjoy the way a little bit of planning and chopping can free up big chunks of my day to do other things.

I ended up using the slow cooker for Easter dinner, and it came out quite nicely. We'd picked up a whole chicken on a major sale at the local grocery store a few weeks back. On Friday afternoon, I moved the chicken from freezer to fridge, and on Sunday morning, it only took me about five minutes of preparation to get it ready for slow cooking all day. I washed and dried the chicken, applied a bit of olive oil and a generous rub of freeze-dried poultry spices, then threw it in the crockpot with some water (so it would make extra broth) and a couple of tablespoons of butter. I put the whole thing on low and cooked it for 8-9 hours. By dinnertime it was moist and juicy. And I've got plenty of leftovers for at least two more meals, including enough broth and small chicken pieces to do a nice chicken soup this week.

Since the sweet girl is not a chicken fan ("Oh look! Chicken bones! Cool! Except...oooh, oh. That means that's a real chicken that got killed so we could eat it. Yuk..." -- yes, she comes by her vegetarianism honestly) I made one of her favorite dishes to go along with it. If the chicken was mostly for D., the rumbledethump was mostly for S. I just love saying the world rumbledethump. It's a delicious potato-based dish based on colcannon recipes. I learned it from Recipes from the Root Cellar . We probably eat it at least once a month. It's a hearty dish made from potatoes, onions, cabbage, a little butter and cheese, some salt and pepper. Last night I made roasted carrots (olive oil and Spike seasoning) to go with it, and also dished up some jarred unsweetened applesauce sprinkled with some cinnamon/sugar. The sweet girl managed two small bites of chicken (more than I expected; I don't mind when she goes full-blown vegetarian) but the rumbledethump, carrots, and applesauce provided plenty of hearty food even without the chicken.

All in all, a delicious, simple meal that was amazingly economical. I am determined to continue to find ways to feed good, real food to my family in the midst of hard times, so this meal felt like a winner.

Edited to add: when thinking about what to do with the leftover chicken for tonight, I suddenly remembered I had leftover ratatouille in the fridge from late last week. Score! Cut up chicken pieces sauteed with the ratatouille = yummy chicken cacciatore-ness.

The Valentine Mailbox

In a little while, my dear husband will be home for lunch, and our family will commence to open the valentine mailbox.

Yes: THE Valentine Mailbox. Your family may have one -- and I'm sure it's a lovely one -- but our family has THE mailbox.

It's the one my dad made for my family when I was a little girl. His printing company was doing some sort of advertisement for the post office so the front looks like the front of an actual mailbox from my childhood (complete with "zippy" the little zip code guy...remember him?). The box itself is an old flat kodak film box, reinforced with tape. It opens for easy mail distribution, but Dad also put a slit in the front so you can slide the cards in.

When the sweet girl was tiny, my folks passed the mailbox on to us. We have loved it and every year fill it with homemade Valentines (and sometimes a few store-bought, but those aren't the main attraction) to give to each other. This year the sweet girl begged to get it out a couple of weeks early, so she's been stuffing it for a while. It's going to be fun to see all the homemade love that spills out.

I've been so swamped that I didn't have a chance to make my beloved's card until a little while ago. While the sweet girl moaned through some math ("products again!? why do I have to do products?") I gathered scissors, glue stick, colorful scraps of paper, a magazine, a computer graphic I liked, and a velveteen bag of crayon rocks. It's amazing what simple things you can use to say I love you.

Newbery & Caldecott Winners; MLK Day

The ALA has announced the 2010 Newbery and Caldecott winners! Congratulations to Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, this year's Newbery recipient, and Jerry Pinkney's The Lion and the Mouse, this year's Caldecott winner. We know the latter but not the former this time around. As always, I'm looking forward to lots of good reading based on the list. You can find the full listing (including all honor books) at the ALA site here.

It's Martin Luther King Jr. day, of course, a day when we always read a book together about King. This year it was My Brother Martin, a picture book written by King's older sister Christine King Farris with wonderful illustrations by Chris Soentpiet. Last year we read David Adler's A Picture Book of Martin Luther King Jr. I also highly recommend The Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., a video presentation that includes the entire "I Have a Dream" speech. If you've never watched and heard that speech in its entirety, it's very much worth your time to track it down (via this video or other means) to do so.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Yes, I'm a day late, but I had to fight round 2 of the terrible intestinal virus (it's apparently that and not flu) and spent yesterday in bed again. Let me tell you, it's really no fun getting blitzed by the same germ twice when you haven't had a chance to recover from the first round.

At least my pajamas are green, so I was still in proper St. Patty's Day attire, if not quite the outfit I was hoping to wear!

Here's what I was planning to post yesterday, in honor of the feast day of one of my favorite saints:

My review of our family's favorite picture book on the life of St. Patrick, Tomie DePaola's Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland.

A link to Bob Hartman's book Early Saints of God, which contains a wonderful profile/story about Patrick for young listeners. This is a great book we've used extensively for the past couple of years, especially during November (following All Saints Day). I think it's out of print, but Amazon still has a number of used copies, some of them quite inexpensive.

The recipe for Irish Soda Bread that the sweet girl and I had planned to make yesterday. My nausea and exhaustion prevented that one, but we hope to make it soon. If anyone beats us to it, let us know how it turns out!

Turkey Talk

At lunch today, the sweet girl was recounting one of her favorite moments in one of our family's favorite, funny Thanksgiving picture books: Thanksgiving at the Tappleton's. Poor Mrs. Tappleton loses her turkey. She's about to put it in the oven when the milkman arrives at the back door early to deliver eggnog (and doesn't that sound nice?). The turkey slips out of her arms, slithers down the icy steps, slides down the hill, and crashes into the icy pond. PLOP! SPLASH!

Definitely a story worth recounting, complete with giggling sound effects.

In the midst of her narration today, the sweet girl suddenly stopped and looked thoughtful.

S: Mommy, what are turkeys made from?

M: (not sure I understood) What do you mean what are they made from?

S: (with an amused chuckle, and sounding quite sure of herself) Well, they aren't the BIRD. So what are they?

M: But yes, they are birds. The turkey is a bird.

S: (eyes widening as the content of the only meat she'll eat slowly dawns) Oh. (Another pause) I don't like turkey.

M: You've always liked turkey. (mostly true)

S: No, I don't like the taste of it.

My budding vegetarian is now armed with more reasons not to eat lunchmeat. Not that I'm terribly worried, having once been a full vegetarian myself, and having only eaten poultry or fish (no beef or pork) for over twenty years.

Still, it made me laugh. What did she think turkey was all this time, if not the bird of the same name? I'm not sure I want to know!

All this turkey talk reminds me of an amusing episode from the thanksgiving dinner table when I was in about the seventh grade. Not long before the thanksgiving holiday, my math teacher had set the class a difficult word problem involving turkey eggs. I can't remember what it was now, but I do remember I wrestled with it mightily and couldn't figure it out. I think we were supposed to turn the answer in and then after the holiday break, she'd let us know if we were right and show us how to work the problem.

Well, when I couldn't figure it out, instead of humbly realizing I just didn't know how to work the problem, I had what I thought was a real epiphany. I decided that perhaps there wasn't an answer at all, and my teacher had set us a trick question as a joke. I triumphantly explained this to my family at the dinner table during thanksgiving, finishing with "so the answer was really zero, because turkeys don't lay eggs!" (And hey, I was about eleven years old at the time...so much older than my daughter now!)

I think there was silence for a moment. Then no doubt chuckles. And then my dear grandmother, who lived with us at the time, and who had almost no tactful bones left in her body by then (she'd always been blunt, but I think age had given her more chutzpah so that she always "told it like it was") announced with great spirit: "Of course turkeys lay eggs!"

"No, they don't!" I insisted (full of spitfire that my epiphany would be doubted).

"Yes, they do!"

"No, they don't!"

"Of course turkeys lay eggs! Where do you think baby turkeys come from?"

Um.....

Well, I couldn't answer that one. So I meekly acquiesed to my grandmother's wisdom (never a bad idea, even when she was less clearly right than in this situation). And my family hasn't ever let me forget the moment. "I hear turkeys don't lay eggs!" is always, always good for a laugh at the McCoy house near thanksgiving.

Hmm. Maybe they really don't lay eggs. I mean, if my five year old is correct, they might not even be birds!

4th of July Learning Project

I hadn't planned any major sort of project with the sweet girl over July 4th. But with a day off from the office and a little girl clamoring to do something fun with Mommy during a gift-morning at home, I decided to see what I could come up with on short notice.

Within the past year I've definitely learned that my daughter's best learning seems to take place through hands-on art projects and something auditory (listening to a story or music). As I reflect on her learning style, I think I am coming to grasp that she learns best with her hands and her ears, even more than visually. It's a good thing for me to know.

Here's what we ended up doing for an hour or so yesterday morning:

*Making a paper flag. We used cardstock, construction paper (red, white and blue) and white poster paints. I measured stripes on the red paper with a pencil and ruler, and she cut them out. We pasted them together on a white page (I helped with spacing, and we made sure that there were seven red stripes and six white). Then we cut and pasted the blue field on the left and dabbed white paint spots, fifty of them, to resemble stars (a lesson in impressionism...and much easier than trying to draw or cut tiny white stars!...if we'd had stickers, maybe we would have used those, but this worked well).

*While we made our flag, we listened again to a "Songs About America" a CD we borrowed from the library last week. It's a CD of American folk songs produced by Kimbo (the folks who did the Moving With Mozart CD we liked so much a while ago). This CD has all sorts of things on it, from a kids' choral rendition of Neil Diamond's "America" (cheesy but fun) to the Star-Spangled Banner, The Yellow Rose of Texas, the Wabash Cannonball, Erie Canal, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, and several other songs. It even includes snippets of Emma Lazarus' poem "Colossus," and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. And it ends with "This Land is Your Land..." which definitely casts me back upon my own grade school days!

*While listening, cutting and pasting, we talked about why the flag had thirteen stripes and fifty stars. We got out the sweet girl's wonderful U.S. puzzle map and pulled out the pieces for the 13 colonies. Quiz time -- can you name them all? I wasn't positive I could anymore, so printed a list from an online source. It was eye-opening for S. to see the small little bit of east coast that was the original U.S. She ended up asking some interesting questions about when some of the other states, in the west, became states.

*I also found a great project (at the "Enchanted Learning" website) where you could learn to fold and snip five-pointed stars, just like Betsy Ross! We had just read a book about Betsy Ross (called A Flag for Our Country) the night before, and it had mentioned the story of her showing General Washington how she could make a five-pointed star with just one snip of the scissors, so this was fun to try. The first set of instructions I found, on another website, were way too complex, but the other set worked great. I made several big five-pointed stars and S. painted one of them with lots of beautiful, swirly colors.

How we came to be reading a book about Betsy Ross at almost 10 pm on July 3rd is a story unto itself. Our town always does their fireworks display on the 3rd. This year we had intended to go down the street to the h.s. stadium to watch them, and the sweet girl had been excited all day about getting to stay up late and go out. But she had a panic attack (no other word will do) as we walked down the sidewalk a little after 9 pm and she began hearing some of the fireworks being set off just in the neighborhood, even before the big ones were due to start. Loud noises have always frightened her, sometimes excessively. That's been getting so much better of late that it didn't even occur to us to worry, but she was so freaked by the loud booms and pops that she simply planted herself and began screaming and crying. No amount of comforting or assurances could seem to assuage her fears (and I think she was over-tired anyway, being up past bedtime). Rather than ruin the fireworks for anyone nearby who might have to endure her wailing, we opted to come home and watch them from the windows, even though we knew our view would be partially obstructed by the sycamores across the road.

Were we wise in that decision? I have no idea. But I do know how much fun we had, turning out all the lights, hunkering down on the living room floor with blankets and quilts and a big flashlight, swirling the light on the ceiling (making our own "fireworks!"), making shadows, reading the Betsy Ross book, and hiding under the blankets whenever we felt scared. The sweet girl's daddy was especially wonderful over this last, getting her to act out her fears and even giggle about them. And I have to confess there was an odd sort of beauty about seeing the fireworks from a distance, with the colorful sparks almost seeming to swim through the sycamore leaves. We got a wonderful view of the planet Jupiter too.

Happy day after the 4th!