LAPHH Everyday

On President's Day, the wind, rain, and gray sky heightened the feeling of wanting to be safe and cozy inside our home.

The kids played, and their twin cousins even stopped by to add to the family togetherness. Jennifer shared a mixed media art project with the kids. My daughter Joey and I worked on a song, me composing on piano, and her writing its lyrics and singing. I also spent some time designing a science ebook for homeschooling children, and Jennifer was busy spinning some amazing yarns. Every day offers an opportunity to LAPHH, to enjoy the blessings and special moments, to be together to share life's little pleasures.

What makes you LAPHH in your daily life? For those of you who follow the Syrendell blog, please tell us and we will post your thoughts.

LOVE: what is your passion, what makes your heart sing?

ABUNDANCE: what is flowing in your life, what are you thankful for?

PEACE: how do you find your inner tranquil space?

HEALTH: how do you maintain your health and well-being?

HAPPINESS: what brings you joy and pleasure?

For us, today, LOVE: time with our children, ABUNDANCE: lots of rain and creativity, PEACE: the warmth of home, HEALTH: Jennifer's chunky monkey, and HAPPINESS: togetherness.

Rain or shine, make every day count!

Valentine's Day!

Today was Valentine's Day. Mommy and Daddy handcrafted gifts for the children. Here are pictures of a couple of the gifts. The ribbons on the streamer stick were dyed with tumeric, brazilwood and copper.

Inspired by 5 Orange Potatoes' blog, we went on a heart hunt in the backyard this morning! We had fun finding and making hearts in nature.

Raw Juicing and Smoothies!

Mommy is a raw food vegan, so we eat lots of fresh fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds in our family. Joey is a vegetarian. All of the boys (Daddy, too!) are omnivores. We help with juicing about every other day. We either make our famous "vruit", a smoothie, or we do fresh citrus juicing (take a looks at these beautiful oranges!). This helps us get our vitamins and minerals naturally, even when we don't feel like eating salads all the time. It's also a fun way to learn the names of the fruits/veggies, count, cut, and help out with preparation. We figure out which ones are roots, which ones are fruits, and which ones grow on vines/bushes/trees. We look for spirals and patterns and we talk about seeds and growing. Our rabbit, Rabbee gets all of the leftover goodies from our juicer!

We purchase most of our fruits and veggies from natural food stores, the organic sections at conventional grocery stores, and farmers' markets. Once per week we visit the Sacramento Waldorf School where they sell their bio-dynamic, organic leafy greens and other seasonal fruits and veggies. Their kale and collards are up to 3 feet in length! Yummy.

Syrendell Vruit

1. Juiceman juicer or other high-quality juicer machine, bowl, wisk, glasses

2. Slice and wash 2 apples, 1 beet (if you leave out the beet, the color of the drink will be more green instead of pink/purple)

3. Wash leaves of kale, spinach, collard greens, chard, dandelion greens, watercress or other dark, leafy greens

4. Wash a handful of parsley or sprouts (alfalfa, clover, broccoli)

5. Wash and lightly scrub with your hands 3 carrots

6. Run all items through the juicer

7. The mixture will land in a bowl. Wisk the mixture.

8. Pour into glasses and drink as is, or add a bit of orange juice to taste!


Syrendell Chunky Monkey Smoothie

1. High speed blender, such as Vita-Mix

2. Place chunks of 3 frozen bananas inside of mixer (when your bananas start to turn soft, cut them up and put in a container in the freezer to save for future smoothies)3. Add 2-4 tablespoons of raw cacao powder

4. Add 2-3 tablespoons of raw organic almond butter (not roasted)

5. Pour chocolate or vanilla almond milks or vanilla soy milk until the blender is 3/4 full (even better, make your own raw almond milk!)

6. Blend on low, then speed up the blender until the consistency is right

7. Serve in glasses and enjoy right away!

Felting at Syrendell

We love to felt! All of us do some sort of wet or needlefelting. We use the clover 5-needle tool and we also use single needlefelting needles.

Our wax crayons have been in a basket for months, but they tend to get dinged up. Joey wet felted a nice lining for the basket out of some beautiful merino wool strips.

Lately, we've been needlefelting outfits for finger puppets. Joey has created an adorable series of finger puppets called the "Seasonal Children", featuring Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. She needlefelted some beautiful Math Gnomes with Mommy for little brother Wilson for Christmas. The gnomes sleep at night in a box with felted lining!

During Christmas, we worked on needle felting balls and turning them into ornaments!

For Valentine's day, Joey felted some small hearts out of some pink wool and sparkle angelina fibers that she carded. She added a pin to the back of each heart and then felted a piece over the pin backing to hold. These will be precious gifts for her cousins and friends from her dance classes!

We created an Acorn Family for our Seasonal Spot (aka, "nature table") by wet felting and then needlefelting clothes for the wooden finger puppets. Each family member received an acorn cup hat!

Our sweet Gnomy has boots, beard and hat, felted by Ricky and Mommy. He is often seen in our Seasonal Spot, or near a seasonal wreath.

Everyone enjoys needlefelting fruits and veggies for our little grocery store. After playing "store", we often take the bounty to the wood stove that Daddy built for Wilson for Christmas and prepare meals.

Wilson loves playing with his rainbow wood home blocks. The Acorn Family fits nicely in the house! Wilson helped Mommy felt a bowl and some tiny fruit for the table this week.

Since we love to spin and don't like to waste, all fiber scraps go into baskets. When it's time to felt, the baskets are a treasure trove of colors and textures, just waiting to become something amazing!

Please Vote for my Knitted Neckwarmer!

Hello everyone! I just found out that my Cotton Candy pink knitted ruffles neckwarmer was selected for Etsy's Loveliest Ladies' items poll on the Storque. You can check out the poll here: http://www.etsy.com/voter_list.php?ref=voter&room_id=29

Please take a minute and vote for me! The top favorite items will be featured in the Season of Love Gift Guides and on the Etsy blog. Thanks!!

Jennifer, aka "tlwoldc" and "syrendell" on Etsy

Artistic Geometry

Geometry is our favorite form of math. Through drawing and building, we experience geometry in different, artistic ways.

The two older kids and Mommy each create a drawing, following the book Artistic Geometry by John Miles. We are learning lines, angles, circles, bi-secting angles, and a variety of polygrams. Shading colors into the angles with our Lyra colored pencils (we purchase these at Great Forest Toys in Fair Oaks, CA) brings the shapes to life!

We tend to stay away from plastic materials, however, we came across two wonderful products at the HSC conference in Sacramento last year. Zometools connect lines into spheres at different angles. We create different polygons and stellations with our Zometools. Here is a picture of Ricky's stellated dodecahedron inside of an icosahedron.

Tubespace are slim tubes that bend and connect into the 5 polyhedra and other shapes. They also glow in the dark!

Folding Circles books are some of our favorite home-learning resources. We fold circles into tetrahedrons, octahedrons and other shapes. Then, we tape or bobby pin shapes together into larger shapes. As the seasons change, we use different colors of circular paper (we buy this at Rudolph Steiner College bookstore) and then our creations become part of our learning environment for a few months. You can see pictures here of our folding circles from autumn hanging from the lamp along with some origami birds, and our current octahedron creations for the winter.

Winter brings snow...or at least in some parts of the world! Although we live about an hour from the snow-capped Sierra mountains, we decided to bring "snow" into our home by making symmetrical snowflakes for our windows out of winter colors. We used kite paper from Rudolph Steiner College bookstore. Gluing smaller versions of the snowflakes onto glass jars, we lit some beeswax candles and watched the beautiful shapes glow in the candlelight!

Speaking of kite paper...one of our latest geometrical adventures is folding window stars. One of our family Christmas gifts was a lovely book, Stars and Flowers Window Transparencies by Frederique Gueret.