home school, travel, healthy living, environmentalism, organics, wholesome family, be the change
Author: Adriana
Adriana is a retired documentary film producer, full-time mom who loves her children, gardening, cooking, crafting, traveling and a simpler lifestyle that incorporates a slower pace.
“As the flowers bloom again, awaken your spirit in the hope of new life. Let the warm kiss of Spring, the re-birth of the colorful buds, green shoots, the unfolding blooms and the morning bird song, once again refresh you in Nature’s eternal regeneration of life.”
Yes, those are crocuses poking out of the spring snow!
One of the kids and my favorite things to do with the arrival of spring is to listen and watch for the new birds that have made their way back up north. We have a bird feeder outside our craft room window that makes for a great place to watch and draw the beautiful birds that stop in for a visit! If you haven’t tried this yet, sketching birds with kids is a great activity. Actually, sketching birds at any age is lots of fun!
Some books we enjoy looking through for inspiration and detail
Do you have a seasonal nature table or display? Each season we set up a spot in our home with objects from nature for the season. This is a great idea for kids because it connects them to nature and science, and allows them to explore it a little further. Depending on their age, you can have them help select what you might put on your nature table to celebrate the season. Some spring ideas: Spring books about birds, flowers, animals coming out of hibernation, bird feathers, bird nests (one you’ve made or something you’ve bought at the store – or if your lucky, maybe a real one), painted wooden bird eggs, paint brushes, water color paints, colored pencils, bird feathers, magnifying glass, binoculars, spring flowers (sometimes we cut pussy willows or forsythia early and put it in a glass jar to open inside the house)…. anything else that you think of that fits the theme and encourages the senses and investigates nature.
Some sketches by Lily (8) and Leo (6)
The Nature Connection is a fantastic workbook for kids! I have used this over and over again with my kids. It’s full of great ideas for what to look for and do every month of the year.
Make your own nature scavenger hunt. The picture on the left my 8 year old, Lily created for her 6 year old brother to have an outdoor scavenger hunt.
Or you can make your own scavenger hunts – some ideas are to have a scavenger hunt theme to look for: seasons, types of birds, bugs, plants/trees/flowers. For younger kids you could have them look for colors in nature or patterns.
Below are some great books about birds that we’ve enjoyed over the years:
A Nest Full of Eggs by Priscilla Belz Jenkins
Crinkleroot’s Guide to Knowing The Birds by Jim Arnosky
National Geographic Kids Bird Guide of North America by Jonathan ALderfer
The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon by Jacqueline Davies
About Birds A Guide for Children by Cathryn Sill
The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs by Andrea Pinnington
Make your own bird nests
Making bird nests with kids is another fun way to study birds and celebrate spring. One idea is to use clay, shape it into a nest shape and add outdoor materials birds would use like moss, sticks and dirt. Shape some clay eggs with air dry clay and paint when dry.
One of our favorite nest activities is edible bird nests! This is a hit with all ages!
I remember loving to make these nests when I was a kid! These chow mein nests come together with just a few ingredients. We like the flavor combination of chocolate and butterscotch.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups Butterscotch chips
1 cup milk chocolate chips
6 oz Chow Mein noodles
1 bag Cadbury mini eggs, jelly beans or other egg shaped candy
Instructions:
Melt the butterscotch chips and chocolate chips either in the microwave or on top of the stove on a double boiler. We usually put the chips in a heat safe bowl on the stove over a small pan of boiling water. Stir continually until everything has melted.
Pour your chow mein noodles into the bowl and stir to coat with the chocolate mixture.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Scoop some of the chow mein mixture onto the parchment paper and carefully move the pieces to mold them into nest shapes. You also can line a muffin tin with cup cake liners and put your nests in there.
Place about 3 egg candies onto the nests.
Place in fridge to harden quickly, or allow to harden on counter for a couple hours.
Enjoy!
Hope these Spring nature themes help brighten your day and time at home as a family.
“The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.” —Harriet Ann Jacobs
When we were first gifted a travel trailer from my folks last winter I was full of mixed feelings: this could be fun, but when would we use it, it’s nice, but how are we all going to sleep well in it – I’m not sleeping well as it is with a new baby, and even if I like it, it looks awful taking over my driveway! My parents recently retired and had decided to winter in the Florida Keys. I think gifting us the trailer was their way of making sure they would get us down there for a visit since our family of six was a bit much for their two bedroom, Key West condo. So, in August we found an opening at Sunshine Key for 16 days. A campground I had spent many winters at as a young girl. Since before I could remember my parents would pack up my dad’s Ford pick-up truck and drive down to the Keys the day after Christmas and not return until spring! We first started out camping in an army green tent built for two and then when I was about 5 and my sister came along, we graduated to a wilderness travel trailer , white with green stripes on the front end, with rust orange cushions, a small bath, kitchen and dining area and a couch that converted into a bed. The tent was now our guest quarters and when you have a campsite in the Florida Keys for 3 months, it’s amazing how many family and friends crawl out of the woodwork to visit! But the visitors, the campers and my family helped create some of my best and most memorable childhood memories. My dad would take off three full months from his landscaping business and spend it with us as a family. We’d spend the day fishing on our wooden turquoise boat traveling to different mangrove islands in search of the best catch, best beach and best place to swim. We’d snorkel and find lobsters, we’d look for hermit crabs, we’d go to the flea market, we’d go down to the marina and see the big catch- once it was a shark as big as a fishing boat! I loved to play bingo and have ice cream sundaes on Sundays at the camp Rec. hall. I felt so grown up riding my bike to the camp general store and buying a strawberry vanilla lollipop with my own money. What kid wouldn’t love it. There’s nothing like camping and there’s nothing better than a campground at night, all the twinkly lights and everyone sitting outside. I loved it. I loved exploring the campground and visiting all my new grandparents in their campers! My favorite was a retired couple from Michigan who camped next door to us whom I called “neighbor” and “other neighbor.” I made good friends, not just my retired friends, but kids, whose parents were on a similar adventure. I even got to sleepover in my friends airstream trailer. I was only in kindergarten, but was completely aware of the hubbub about airstreams. I didn’t know why they were so special, I kind of thought they looked like a submarine. Here and there my mom put me in school as I got older and I couldn’t miss as much school back home, but most of the time I just did worksheets my teacher sent from my NJ school and that was more than enough to get by. What I was learning on a daily basis camping far outshined anything I would be exploring sitting in a classroom looking at a book! I was learning about life, about having an appreciation for and the preciousness of the environment (the Keys has the third largest coral reef and numerous endangered species), I was learning how to catch my own dinner and how to cook it up, I was learning geography, history and above all social skills! When I think back to how much I learned in those three months every year, it far surpassed the other school months combined! But, beyond that, I felt the closeness of family. It is such a precious experience that is hard to put into words. And even with all of this behind me, for some strange reason, I was afraid and anxious to put my 4 kids in the car and go on an adventure of our own. For some reason I was letting the trailer represent stress and unease. I had so much stress over the thought of getting everything together, of the days in the car together, keeping up with school work, being a passenger while my husband drove for days! I had become so content with the way things were, I couldn’t really see out of the box. Little did I know, Mike was feeling stressed too about the drive down from New England to Florida, about knowing enough about the trailer to do what was needed, about having all of us in the car with him for 4 days! The stress was giving him stomach problems and me break downs! Yet, before we knew it, ready or not, the day came when we had to get on the road. And I guess something magical happened that morning, probably a feeling that only those who have embarked out on a new adventure could know, it’s this rush of adrenaline that moves you forward into the unknown with a confidence that almost feels foolish, but there’s this reassurance because you can tell you all share in this feeling together. And with that, all of us piled into our Ford pick-up, trailer in tow and we rolled out of our driveway and onto the route of adventure, the route of freedom – you wouldn’t know we were still on our street, yet it was suddenly liberating! The trailer no longer represented stress or frustration, it represented freedom and was our new home. This is how our journey began. This is how we rediscovered our family, our passions, our country, our visions, our love and our lives. This is how we rediscovered our route. We invite you to be a part of our route and hope it helps inspire you to discover yours. You don’t have to hit the road in your travel camper to start on a new journey or have a new vision or live in a better way, it helps and we encourage it, but it is not the be all to discovering your route – all you need is courage, determination, the right tools and an openness to change. Join us and Be the Route!
Mike and I started this website after traveling this winter with our kids and feeling so good about finding new routes in life and sharing our discoveries with you all. But oh how life has changed. Now we find ourselves in unprecedented times: times of fear and stress. Anxieties over the unknown and isolated. I don’t have any answers as to how we can stop what is happening right now in our world. I wish I did. I continue to pray that those around us with knowledge and power help to put an end to this pandemic. So, as we wait, in our homes together, I humbly hope that I may be able to bring some calm to your day or even for a moment. I myself have always loved being a homebody. I love starting the day slow. I have always moved at a slower pace, which at times has truly helped me to relate to my children. Especially when they were younger and slow was a very common pace! From putting on shoes and jackets, to looking at a puddle in the driveway, bubbles flying in the air or an ant traveling across the sidewalk – embracing the pace, has helped me move forward and connect.
Surprisingly, we haven’t had to change much around here. Since we are already homeschoolers, not much has been disrupted with our school schedule and learning, aside from me prepping to be a little more of a homesteader if at all possible! But, those are lessons I feel are just as important for the kids to learn as is math and reading. So, over the past week as we have prepared to be at home and social distancing, we have explored our family life and survival world a little deeper than before. I ran out of bread yeast! To my dismay, so has Stop and Shop! I haven’t made fresh bread any other way. This is where the internet and google are a gift. I looked up how to start your own sourdough yeast starter. I will include a link to the site and directions below. Instead of starting my own, my kind, resourceful neighbor brought over a sourdough starter that was ready to go along with some chicken and duck eggs! So, the kids and I have been baking our own bread. If you’re home is at all like mine, we can’t keep sliced bread enough in surplus around here. I usually buy extra and freeze it, but it is definitely a staple of our household. And right now I don’t want to be running to the food store more often then needed, if at all. Thankfully, there’s nothing like fresh homemade bread and I’m so glad the kids agree and I’m sure you will too after you pull yours out of the oven!
Some of my fondest childhood memories are spending Sundays at my Italian grandparent’s home in New Jersey. My grandparent’s made almost everything from scratch. They didn’t have a yard with grass, they had a giant garden with peach, apricot and fig trees, eggplants, peppers, lettuce, broccoli arabe, herbs, beans, baseball bat squash hanging from the grape vine rafters and of course, tomatoes; rows and rows of tomatoes. As a kid, I never quite appreciated their uniqueness and resourcefulness. They never went to Target to find what they needed. They went to their garage and whatever they were looking for, it was most likely there! My grandfather was the Italian McGuiver – he could make a chair using wood, plastic and shoelaces! He used handkerchiefs instead of tissues and he really only had a handful of outfits in circulation. He made his own bread, cheese, wine and sausage. And even though I’m not a meat eater, I loved that sausage and still dream about it! Something special about making it from scratch. In there basement my grandfather had his wine cellar. It was a hidden room strait out of a Nancy Drew novel. After finding your way to the laundry room through the sausage and cheese hanging from the basement ceiling, there was a secret door and inside was a small room with a dirt floor, shelves full of glass jars with tomato sauce made by my grandmother and three giant barrels of fermenting wine. I always felt so special when my Nonno would take me down there. We’d sit on a wooden bench and he’d put a giant plastic tube in one of the barrels of wine, suck on it and start the flow. He’d pour us both a cup and we’d sit there, most often in silence, since I didn’t speak much Italian and he didn’t speak much English, but he’d say, “very good wine, no?” and I’d nod and we’d sit there watching the feet go by the small basement window and guess who was stoping by for dinner. My grandma, Nonna, made her own bread. It wasn’t a soft sandwich bread. It was hard as a rock and in order to eat it, you had to put it in water to soften (she made it in large batches like this because it was easier to store and didn’t go bad like fresh bread).
It’s funny now to think of such things. As a young child, I didn’t understand why they worked so hard to make all these things when they could buy them at the store. I didn’t fully appreciate all the hard work that went into doing what they did. As I grew older, I had more appreciation. No one made sauce like my Nonna. That pretty much goes for everything she made, it all had an unbelievable taste because it was fresh, because it didn’t get shipped in from another country, it was grown and made on location. And now, reflecting back, I feel I can appreciate their simplicity and hardwork even more. My grandparents were ready for anything. They had a pantry full of good, supplies (whatever was on sale, they always bought extra even if it meant storing five boxes of toothpaste, it was worth it if it cost them $1 cheaper)! My Nonna’s freezer and fridge were always stocked. They lived through a World War in a small Italian Mountain village. My grandfather fought in WWII for Italy. He was in the Navy at age 19 and his ship was sunk; he swam for 11 hours at sea only to be saved by another ship and taken to the USA as a prisoner of war. My Nonna grew up having to hide food in the brick wall so the police wouldn’t take it because they were only allowed to keep as much as they needed to feed their family and the rest was expected to go to others. She grew up having to dig trenches outside her home at the age of nine, she had to tend to the garden and the animals, she had to cook, clean, sew and crochet, she had to go to the mill with her grain and grind it up to make flour for baking. She wasn’t deprived of the beauty of life, but she was taught and trained to be resilient. To make things last and to appreciate what you had, to go without and to be resourceful. I share these stories with you, hopes that they give you hope. That they remind you of your own resilience and those of your ancestors whose blood runs through your veins and those of your children. We have been blessed as human kind, to not have to go through times like we are experiencing now and although I truly wish we did not have to experience them, I believe they will make us all a little stronger. Our families, our hearts and our homes. We will persevere.
So, as my home has slowed the pace a little more, I encourage you all to do the same. To embrace the pace, to bake some fresh bread make a pot of soup and enjoy your time together. Most families don’t eat meals together never mind cook or bake together. I am trying hard to keep faith and believe that a greater more beautiful lesson will come from all of this fear and time of unrest. And I truly believe that there is so much to be said for slowing the pace, for living more simply for taking time for yourself and others to fully appreciate the precious moments and precious gift of life itself. I pray you are all safe and healthy and that you are able to find moments of peace and calm and be reminded of our true human resilience. It is a gift we all have.
Now I go out to rake the vegetable beds and prepare my cold frame for our 2020 Victory Garden.
With Peace and Solidarity from my home to yours,
Adriana
Here is a Great link to starting your own Sourdough starter – Good Luck, take your time and Enjoy!
Basic No Knead Sandwich Bread: (Do this before bed)
Mix 3c flour (I use 1c WW and 2c Bread flour), 1tsp salt, 1.5c water and 1/4c starter (which I stir into the water first). Cover the bowl and leave in a warm spot overnight.
In the morning, knock it back and let it rise for 60min, then knock it back again, shape and put in greased loaf pan. Cover and let rise to almost cresting the pan, but not quite…about 20-30min depending on how warm the space is. I do it in the oven with the light on.
When ready to bake, preheat oven to 425F, flour the top of the loaf and snip to score (I go lengthwise, but you can do a few short diagonal ones, too) and put pan in over COVERED! You can use another loaf pan (I do this) or make a foil tent, but give the bread room to grow. Bake 20min, then uncover for 10min.
That’s it.
If you’re in a rush, you can shape and rise in the pan first thing, and not do the second rising, but the bread will be more dense.
We are so glad you found us and Welcome you to join our family as we travel through life’s adventures and discover new routes together!
About us:
Mike is a self- employed General Contractor, an outdoors-man, a carpenter, a runner, and a hands-on dad who loves his kids, traveling and creating new things.
Adriana is a retired documentary film producer, full-time mom who loves her children, gardening, cooking, crafting, traveling and a simpler lifestyle that incorporates a slower pace.
We have rediscovered our routes through striving to live simpler, traveling in our travel trailer and being a full time family. We hope to inspire you to rediscover yours! Join us on this journey as we navigate life as a family of six, home-school, travel in our camper, care for the environment, and practice living in a better way.
Be The Route 