Well, we just about had time to eat the turkey (chicken, really) before winter came. We woke up to a White (rather than Black) Friday this morning, and the snow has been keeping up all day.

Perhaps it’s because I am energised by cold weather but I love it. It has immediately woken up the Christmas spirit in me (not that it takes much to wake it up, but still) and I am positively raring to start baking cookies, decking the halls, wrapping the presents…

Mind you, before I get down to doing any of that—especially the wrapping—I actually have to *make* the presents, and that’s where I am lagging slightly behind. As in, I haven’t done anything yet. I have been sidetracked with my digital Christmas scrapbooking kit, which is now nearly finished, and with finding a good e-download selling programme, which I have now found.

The good thing, though, is that I can use the papers and stuff from the kit to make cards and at least some of the presents (the paper-based ones). It’s just a question of finding the time to do it all…

On this cold, crisp November day, I am grateful for Niccolo, Caterina, my husband, my parents, my wider family. I am grateful that we are healthy and have all we need. And most of all I am grateful because, despite work woes, gnawing parenting worries, and an unsettling sense of insecurity for the world’s financial and terrorism crises, we are managing to stay happy and have a laugh (well, most of the times, anyway).

On my table today:

fois gras with brioche

pumpkin soup with prosciutto

chicken with chestnut and bacon stuffing

spicy sweet potatoes

apple pie with vanilla ice cream

and the infamous, mutant cornucopia…

Someone asked me how I afterschool—so here comes. Because Nicco already spends plenty of time in school, I don’t do any workbooks or seatwork with him. I don’t want to bore him to tears and run the risk of burning him out. Instead, we curl up on the sofa with a bunch of good books.

But wait, afterschooling is a bit different from plain old reading. I sneakily choose books to fit a loose curriculum which I draw up every month. So, for example, because we are celebrating Thanksgiving this month, the ‘curriculum’ touches upon America, its discovery (with stories about Thorvald the Viking, Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci), the arrival of the pilgrims (with a couple of stories on the first Thanksgiving) and the meaning of giving thanks and being grateful about what we have (with a bunch of moral tales).

After I read aloud the story, we look up places on our inflatable globe, watch the odd video clip on Youtube if there are any relevant ones, and most of all talk about what happened—what would you have done in Columbus’ place when his crew lost hope, for example, or were the children right or wrong in climbing on the barn’s roof in the Visit. Sometimes we play games that are linked to the book, sometimes Nicco tries to read some of the book’s words, and often we end up cooking something we read about.

That’s the essence of it, with the odd bit of counting, addition and subtraction thrown in (Nicco loves questions like: “If you have seven and I give you three more, how many do you have?” He also loves asking me questions, usually about numbes that, for him, are enormous: “If you have fifty and I give you a hundred, how many do you have?”). Oh, and we craft—drawing, painting, mucking about with play dough or clay…we do it all.

Of course, when I see he just wants to play, I back off from afterschooling. But he really loves reading and we tend to go through at least one story every afternoon. I bet he doesn’t even realise it is some form of schooling…

We must be the only non-American family to celebrate Thanksgiving this side of the pond. This is partly because we are partial to holidays and like to celebrate as many as we can, and partly to honour Manfredi’s American relatives (I am thinking of you, Georgeann).

So we are busy getting ready for it. The food is there (in my mind, that is—the actual cooking will be a two-day job between Wednesday and Thursday) and the decorations are coming along nicely, especially now that Niccolo got involved. We made a Thanksgiving tree and shaped a horn of plenty out of DAS paste (when I say shaped, I mean sort of shaped—the horn got given some extraordinary ridges which make it look like a stegosaurus with no head).

The horn got painted today, and Nicco was adamant he wanted it to be blue, red and yellow. I could show him pictures of brown horns till the cows came home—he still wanted it multicolour, and in random patches please. Our mutant horn is drying now, and should be ready to be filled tomorrow with chestnuts, walnuts, pomegranades and grenadillas (not quite the traditional thing, I know, but they are a lovely shade of orange).

We’ll finger paint some turkeys next and turn them into place cards. I was hoping to find some more ideas in Five in a Row’s Thanksgiving ebook, which I downloaded today, but they had a Thanksgiving tree and a bread cornucopia, both of which we have sort of done.  Shame (although there are a couple of yummy recipes in there too, so I didn’t completely waste $6).

We are also reading up a lot on Thanksgiving, now that Niccolo is old enough to understand and enjoy what the celebration is all about. I have found loads of old, copyright-free stories to enjoy. Favourites so far are: The First Thanksgiving Day (from Wiggin and Smith’s Story Hour), The Visit (from Lindsay’s More Mother Stories) and The Spirit of the Corn (from Jenkins Oldcott’s Good Stories for Great Holidays).

Tonight we’ll start on Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving. It’s long, and Nicco is probably too young for it, but we’ll see if Alcott works her literary magic on him.

P.S.: the Christmas kit is coming along nicely. I am looking for a decent e-sales solution now, and hopefully will be in business soon!

So I have been going on about the grand plan for this blog and my life. Well, after much studying, considering and generally procrastinating, I have finally take the first steps. So here it is: I have decided to turn my crafting into a little side business, selling digital scrapbooking papers and a journaling e-book with hundreds of ready made quotes, titles and useful phrases for scrapbookers and art journal makers to choose from.

Now, the book will take a while to finish (seen as I have only just started writing it) but the digital scrapbook kits are faster to put together and coming along nicely. I have been working chiefly on Christmas stuff, because that’s what I need for my own projects. Here is a peek at one of the vintage Christmas papers I developed.

Vintage Christmas digital scrapbboking paper

The papers are all ready, and will be up for sale in a few days as a vintage Christmas paper selection. The tags, ribbons, brushes and embellishments are in the making but, when ready, a full vintage Christmas scrapbooking kit will be available for download. While this stuff is ready to use for digital scrapbooking, it can also be printed out and used in hybrid or traditional scrapbooking and mixed media projects—well, the papers and tags can.

I can’t believe I am actually doing this, after having been sitting on it for an absolute forever. But I am so happy about it! Feedback, as usual, is much appreciated.

I am a city girl and usually happy with my lot. I like to have the buzz of the city around me, the shops, the services, the ease of life. But today, on my homeschooling quest, I stumbled upon this lovely blog: http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Dell/. And I was seized by the desperate need to live in a place like that: where the leaves turn golden and red (and not sickly yellow); where a nature walk means spotting a squirrel on a tree or a fox by the entrance door (and not cockroaches and rats scurrying in the Tube’s tunnels); and where children are so beautiful, well-dressed and even better photographed (and not like some other children I know, who always look like little monkeys).

OK, if I had to settle for just one thing, the pictures would be it. Why do her children look so beautifully elegant and poised in a picture, while mine look like this?

Oh my goodness. I can’t believe it has been more than a month since I last posted. Nearly two months really. I have been buried under a vast amount of work from which I am only now managing to emerge. So much for my end of summer optimism that, when Niccolo resumed school, I’d be able to blog, craft and be otherwise free.

Instead, I got more work, more work and even more work. Which is good for my finances, but not so good for my sanity. So my strategic decision is to try and keep the workload lighter and manageable until the New Year. This will give me time to make all the Christmas presents (I am already panicking), reduce my stress levels beyond red alert, and hopefully give some shape to my still nebulous plans for this blog and my crafty business.

And look after the kids, of course. The only non-work-related thing I have done over the course of the last two months has been to after-school Niccolo. I have been experimenting massively to try and nurture his curiosity, encourage his budding reading skills and generally keep him busy. The end result is my very own literature-based afterschooling curriculum, which mixes elements of Five in a row, Sonlight, Charlotte Mason and Old Fashioned Christian Education with some crafts and lots of hands on activities thrown in. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, is probably because you don’t have a child of schooling age.

So far, so good. Niccolo seems to enjoy it, although he doesn’t much like the copyright-free books I am getting off the Internet (which on the other hand I like because they are free, thus allowing me to cover virtually any topic he expresses an interest in at zero cost).  His reading is progressing apace, he seems to have a good grasp of basic arithmetic (he figured that two plus three equals five, and is genuinely obsessed with comparing sizes—of countries in particular) and his general knowledge of the world is expanding to a point that I consider almost scary—just a few days ago, after reading a story where a house goes up in smoke, he enquired about the levels of fire resistance of various materials. He started off with the obvious ones—wood, metal, cement—and ended up with: ‘How about carbon fibre?’

And he is definitely using his brain. He was trying to determine the biggest of numbers and, when I explained to him that numbers are infinite, he thought for a while then decreed that “so numbers come back where they begin—like a circle which doesn’t begin or doesn’t end.” For a four year old, it is not too bad a way to represent the concept of infinity.

Alas, his behaviour isn’t improving to the same degree. He is still headstrong and argumentative, although introducing a basic star chart seems to have made him ever so slightly more compliant. I console myself thinking he will make a good lawyer some day…

Meanwhile, Caterina has dramatically improved her gross motor skills—to the point that she is now a danger to herself. She has learned to propel herself on the baby chair (by pushing against the floor with her feet) and figured that if she grabs the side of her cradle with both hands, she can lift herself up. Both cradle and baby chair have quickly been retired after she took these exploits to an extreme and tried to get out of them head first.