blackberry muffins and one of the world's most toxic animals...oh my!

so we tried to go mushroom picking on monday and of course still no chantrelles. lucien, asher, zoe and i still had a good time traipsing through the woods and looking at trees and bugs and birds. well there was that one time when zoe tried to follow me through some particularily thick brush and got stuck, but i don't need to reiterate tantrums here. at least not today. lucien found a rough skinned newt on the trail so we all had a little chance at holding it (or touching it in ash's case) and when we were done, put it back in its its habitat. lucien of course asked if we could take it home and keep it but i have to say no to that. NO WILD ANIMALS! anyway, one of the things lucien wanted to know was what newts eat and insisted that we look it up when we got home. of course we forgot until lucien was long gone with his dad so i looked up the information and favorited it to show him on tuesday. well, we found out that newts eat worms and tadpoles and leeches and bugs but that they also are one of the most toxic animals on earth. we read about a guy from coos bay, oregon who ate one on a dare and died. good thing for us, we also learned that for some reason the rough skinned newts on vancouver island (and surrounding area i assume) have lost their toxicity and are relatively benign. After checking out newts yesterday morning, lucien and I set to putting the studio back in order from his epic fort builing the previous day and did some other random chores around the house. it isn't easy to get lucien's help but he is getting better at not protesting clean up time! we headed out to do deliveries (late as usual) and picked aiden up from school and took a little time hanging out at april point bluffs before heading home to make muffins. the boys made some peanut butter balls for snacks (from peanut buter lucien made) while i found us a muffin recipe. we subbed blackberries for blueberries in our recipe and we all agreed afterward that they were the best homemade muffins we ever had. this was probably because we took care to make them big! i liked the low sugar content and the boys liked the berries!

almost a year since i started this

and really it is the first time in awhile that i even felt like typing it out again. i was like "what's the point?" jamie is off somewhere (filling the woodbox i hope) and lucien is up past his bedtime playing with asher in the studio. i promised him he could stay up past his bedtime if he played well with his brother. maybe a mistake considering he has Farmhouse in the morning. Farmhouse is an unschool school that lucien goes to two days a week. i feel like it is like a little bit of guilt free baby sitting for us homeschooling types. i guess i stayed away from doing any sort of blog activities for for so long cause i was thinking what was the point. well, now i think i have come up with a point, or at least an excuse. i want to document more of luciens learning but in a how it relates to everything going on in our lives way. the stuff i write down documenting our learning for his "school" is just too impersonal. i think when i look back those updates i wont remember that we went to the beach that day cause i was cranky or jamie had some time off and that's why we spent so much time skiing and snowboarding instead of bookwork and so on. to give me a more rounded and indepth detailing of why we did what we did. so today, wednesday, is veggie day. it is the day a huge lot of veggies show up at my house and i put them into bins for my customers and deliver them. basically all the learning that happens on these days comes from a video and occasionally i can convince lucien it is a good idea to help me. asher mostly sleeps and screams on wednesdays. today i woke lucien with an apple pie (suprise leftover from thanksgiving found in the oven) and eggs benny. we had a good day!