To Market We Go

The Logan Square Farmers' Market has moved indoors for the winter, and lucky for us, they've chosen the Congress Theatre for the location, which is just a one block walk from our house. It's a treat to see this space in the daylight. There's a noticable haze throughout the lobby, no doubt the remains of the previous night's concert audience. There was recorded music on this visit, something light and airy, trying to capture the feeling of a warm fall afternoon and highlight the crisp, delicious apples and pears that dominated the stands, but they could not completely mask the grungy factor of the actual space, which we considered a bonus.







Of course, there were crepes to be eaten.






And we had lots of fun with our remote control, which we've only recently been using to get some family portraits. Otto took several self portraits.





It was such a beautiful sunny day that we wanted to stay outside. The boys consented to go to the park, but they spent a large chunk of this time playing their DSi's while sitting beneath the shade of the slide (so they could see their screens, of course).



And so we lured them on yet another walk, this time to check out New Wave cafe, a newish coffee shop that opened up in the heart of Logan Square. The draw? They have an old Nintendo 64. It's so old and unreliable that there are printed instructions atop the player which say something like: "If the game stalls, wiggle the cartridge, then take it out and give it a kiss." There are more than a dozen games, but we found the one with our most favorite hero. Mario is everywhere we are, it seems.


No complaints here, though. We were able to have a relaxing time in both a park and a cafe, and take a long walk on a nice afternoon, too. It's all good.

Halloween 2009

We started the morning with breakfast at Lula. There was a long wait, but luckily the boys had their DSi's and a good space on the floor.



Risotto with brussels sprouts, wild mushrooms and crispy parsnips.



Lamb tortilla with scrambled eggs, avocado, mole, black beans and spaghetti squash. It was really amazing.



We went to the Botanic Garden for the Spooky Pooch Parade. We didn't find them to be spooky so much as we found them to be cuties. But it was fun.





We gave treats to one particularly sweet doggie.





Astro dog.





There are over 300 mum plants in each of these towers.



We loved these berries, and it seemed especially appropriate for Halloween: don't they look like a bunch of tiny pumpkins?



Back at home, we did some more decorating. We realized we had a bit of a lost opportunity, seeing as our downstairs apartment is still empty. We could have had a "haunted apartment" set up down there, we could have had a little Halloween party in it, or we could have at least to put up some spooky decorations and hung out there while we passed out candy. Alas, it didn't occur to us until we were putting up our last minute decorations in our upstairs apartment.

Max tried to play a spooky song on the piano.



We made our own witch houses.





We spooked up the porch a bit.



Due to the construction project, our front stairway still has no light, so it is already pretty spooky. We put candles all the way up the stairs to give us a bit of illumination, but it was still pretty dim. We also hung strips of crepe paper in the doorway (think 70s beads, only these looked more like a mummy's rags). And hanging from the screen door, there is a little witch whose eyes light up, whose legs kick, and who cackles loudly when you open the door. In the background, we played a Halloween mix which features some pretty creepy laughs and some very eerie tunes. It echoed nicely through the otherwise empty stairwell. We wondered if it was almost too creepy, since our porch light is also out. We had to rely on the flickering lights from the jack-o-lanterns. But since we went out trick-or-treating in the early hours, we were only home to pass out candy after 8 pm, and most of the trick-or-treaters we got were a bit older. They seemed to think our decorations were appropriately scary.





But I suppose that is getting ahead of things.

First, we did our own bit of trick-or-treating. We realized it was the first time we could remember being out before dark. It was great to have Halloween on a Saturday, to have Martin with us all day, to be able to go out so early and be home for lots more fun in the evening. We also managed to have the longest session of trick-or-treating we have ever had.





Some of our favorite scenes.







The goodies.



And now, we're eating some of that candy and watching Harry Potter, which seems like a good way to end the evening.

More Halloween Activities

We made our mummy craft, thanks to the cute little craft kits from Millie's party on Tuesday.




Max designs his AT-AT driver pumpkin.





Boba and AT-AT Driver.



Martin's very menacing Jack.



From the inside.



The pumpkins are starting to gather.



We were all having too much fun carving to bother making dinner, so we ordered pizza, and Max and Martin went out to pick it up (as well as some candles for our pumpkins). Lucky Vito's forgot to pie cut it (it tastes so much better in triangular shapes, in my opinion), and the delivery boys apparently tipped the pizza on its side on the way home, so it was a bit of a mess. But it still tasted really yummy.

Midnight Circus

We headed down to Daley Plaza for three showings of Midnight Circus, the fabulous bunch of actors, acrobats, aerialists, clowns and musicians who take over Franken Plaza every October to amaze and delight us.

We went with a huge group of other unschoolers, many of them the same kids with whom I have been viewing Midnight Circus since they were toddlers, and several of them are now taking their own circus arts classes.

Before the second show, gathering on the Picasso sculpture.



In captive conversation.



During the performance (our group comprises most of this section).





Ivana Ivanova wishes the MC a happy birthday.











A head to head competition.







Guest appearance from David Boo-ie, normally with Cirque de Soleil in Montreal, but apparently in town and up for performing with his old friends.





The king rides again.











The big finish.



The usual reference to Thriller seemed a bit more passionate this year.







After the show, we checked out the oragne fountain, which, reportedly, does NOT taste like Orange Crush.



The farmer's market is there on Thursdays, so there was the added fun of that.



Look who's coming to the Chicago Theatre. Just in case we need a bit more acrobatic inspiration to our autumn.



We watched a bit of rehearsal for the 5:30 aerial act.





The boys took a few final slides down the Picasso. I love to say that.



The commute home.

Millie's Halloween Party

Our friend Amelia loves any excuse for a party. She is a girl with a vision, that's for sure. I didn't take my camera, so I had to rely on my phone for photos. I am still kicking myself over that one, since there was so much thought put into all the decorations and the activities.

When we arrived, Millie (Amelia) had already set up a "scene" at the dining room table.




Those are real potatoes those skeletons are "feasting" on—they've been a science project on their bookshelf for quite some time.

There was bobbing for apples:



Make your own skull/ghost/mummy pizza:




Some really tasty homemade chili with spider pastries:



A pinata:







Wicket, everybody's favorite Ewok, even showed up:



We didn't line the kids up and get photos of all of them in their fantastic costumes. You can see some of them in the pinata photos.

And many of the adults joined in on the action. Kelly and Craig were a witch and a vampire and had on ghoulish make up (so ghoulish that it was starting to freak Truman out, and he insisted that his dad wash that stuff off his face, which Craig did). I didn't get a good photo of the two of them, and I didn't get a photo at all of Kelly, it seems. She was too busy making pumpkin cookies to decorate (we ran out of time for that, so we just ate them, naked) and getting together the mummy craft (we ran out of time for that too, so she just sent all the kids home with the supplies). All that fun, and a gift bag too!

At the end, as most of the guests trickled away (some of them had to get home to do homework, two of them were former homeschoolers who jokingly shook their fists at us for being able to hang around into the later hours), the remaining parents sat around the table, shared some wine, and discussed costumes, Harry Potter, potentially haunted (or at least very creepy) houses and bloody noses. Martin stopped by after work (and was actually early enough to get in on most of the wine drinking fun). It was a very nice gathering, and we are really happy to have been included in on the fun.

Tipoli and Piki

I've been meaning to post this for a while.

Back in August, Max and Otto wanted to make a claymation movie, and I had promised to help them. But while I was doing the dishes, they apparently took care of it themselves. I feel certain they did a better job than the one which would have resulted with my help, where I would have tried to "teach" them how to make sure the camera did not move, tried to give them some idea of how many shots to take per second (this would have required me researching it online, since I have no idea), and I might have even encouraged them to figure out a story before they started filming. Thank goodness I stayed out of the way, even if it was inadvertently.



They have made a few more, but we ran out of hard drive space in order to store them (and the space it takes to actually create the movies), so I'll have to save posting those for another day.

The Mario Brothers

Today we made the hats to go with the overalls, and suddenly, we had the real live Mario Brothers in the house!









The plumbers made a house call.




I paid them in candy.



And then they played Super Mario 64 while wearing their overalls. It's also a rare sighting of Otto in actual clothes. He looks so cute!

A Trip to Belvidere

On Sunday, the sun was shining, the very last farmer's market of the season was calling, and we had an important errand to run, which meant a drive all the way to Belvidere (60 miles). So we piled into the car and stopped for crepes before we began our roadtrip.

The market was crowded, and the line for crepes was long. The croissants looked pretty tasty, though.




We ran into friends and their babies.



Bellies full, we piled back into the car and drove away. Our errand? To buy overalls. Apparently, it's very difficult to find overalls in larger sizes, like beyond 5T. I called everyone I could think of: OshKosh, Gap, Old Navy, Target, Kohl's. The reason? Max and Otto are dressing up as Mario and Luigi for Halloween. We have done this before, and we have the red and green shirts, the white gloves, we bought fleece to make the hats. I thought the overalls part would be pretty simple, and Max has a pair from last year, but they are too small for him now. So after at least an hour on the phone, calling all the above stores, and after a quick trip out to some local thrift stores to see if by chance there were any on the racks there (there were not), Martin suddenly asked, "What about Farm and Fleet?"

Of course.



He looked up a few locations, and found this one in Belvidere, where we had been about a month ago on our way apple picking. We remembered the cute coffee shop and little downtown there and thought that would be enough to make our visit worthwhile.

Unfortunately, it was closed. As was the neighboring candy shop. The attached bakery was still open, and we stopped in for pie and apple fritters, but the owner made us feel weird when we asked about the coffee shop. We remembered that he had made us feel weird on our previous visit as well. Martin was extremely disappointed with our excursion ending on such a down note, but I am pretty sure we all had fun, despite any disappointment of closed candy stores.



I think it is more disappointing for Martin because he only has the two weekend days to feel like he can do these sorts of things, and he is more prone to feeling like we didn't "seize" them if they didn't turn out as well as he had hoped. He had also mentioned "running around in nature" several times along the drive, and hoped we would stumble upon some beautiful field or forrest or lake or something similar, so when that did not manifest, I think he felt the whole trip was a disappointment.

But hey, we got overalls, which made the boys happy. And there were big pictures painted on the sides of the buildings, which made for funny portraits.

Inspired

We picked up Martin from the hospital this morning after another electrocardioversion. Let's hope this one worked. We had danishes and breakfast at Tre Kronor and headed to River Park, which is a big beautiful park which runs along, surprise!, the river. We rarely go there, since it's not terribly close to us, but it's close to the hospital. There are so many beautiful colors out right now, and since it was a rainy gray day, we had the park to ourselves. We walked the bird and butterfly sanctuary along the river, and we collected so many fabulous leaves. Please excuse the fact that there are no photos of Martin, which is a terrible thing, especially considering that today should be about him. He took a few with his iPhone, I didn't even carry mine with me.





We came home to hot chocolate and an email from my dad, with a video attached. So we spent some time watching some insanely good bike stunts by Danny MacAskill on YouTube. It's just what you need on a cold rainy day, when you thought you were sick and exhausted and ready to cuddle up on the couch (we are still sick, after all). But after watching these, I feel a bit more inspired, and I'm ready for a more exciting afternoon. Martin hardly gets a day off, after all, and even if it's because he had to get his heart shocked a bit, I think we should do something a bit more celebratory.



Martin has been commuting to work on his bike for the last few months. After watching this, he's thinking he needs to kick it up a notch. But hey, at least he loves his job.

Post Depart'em Depression

We've all been having lots of dreams lately, perhaps because we're sleeping more than usual, or later than usual—although we've not really been sleeping enough, in my opinion: Max woke at 8 yesterday morning and bolted upright, saying, "I think we've overslept!" and insisted we all get up out of bed. Overslept? I have no idea where he learned this concept, since we don't have any time we regularly wake up, nor any activity scheduled early enough in the morning that we would need to be awake by 8 a.m.

But anyway, back to the dreams. Rudolf Steiner would probably say we've been eating too many potatoes: "People who eat potatoes do not get strong thoughts, but they get heavy dreams. If somebody has to eat potatoes all the time, he will actually be a bit tired all the time, and will always be wanting to sleep and dream. Therefore the food that man actually receives has an important bearing on the history of civilization." I read that last night in my Farmer John cookbook, while I was preparing a bit of potato and cabbage pancakes for dinner. The kids refused to touch them, however, declaring them disgusting (they were actually really tasty), so I suppose the potatoes had nothing to do with Max's dream after all. Plus, and I say this with great respect, Rudolf Steiner was just a tiny bit nuts.

So this morning, Max was excited to tell me that he had a really long dream (it was an "epic dream," really, with multiple locations and people and ideas). He tried to string it together for us:

Max and Otto and Truman were playing hide and seek with Puffy (the stuffed puffin who has gone everywhere with us since April), and Truman hid it in the bathroom and somehow accidentally flushed it down the toilet. (Here's where the adventure part begins, according to Max.) They tried to find it, and they were following all these pipes, and then one of our friends, a different friend, an unidentified friend, showed up with a car, it was an old car, some kind of really cool old car, but it was too small for everyone to fit in, and it somehow transformed into an SUV. And suddenly, we were all at the Museum of Science and Industry, but then it seemed more like the aquarium, there were all these "animated fish," and then he realized it was not Truman but Fergus and Effie who were with him. He paused here in his recounting and said, "it was kind of like August Rush," although I'm not sure what he means by that, since, when I asked him about it, he just said he was still thinking a lot about that movie (we watched it last night, and Max really loved it), and that parts of his dream were like that movie.

He kept trying to connect things logically (like trying to figure out how Truman became Fergus and Effie) and it was really fascinating and fun to talk through how dreams are just bits and pieces that don't always make sense. It didn't stop him from trying to make it make sense, though, and he got a bit frustrated that as he was telling it, the very dream seemed to be slipping away from his memory. There were even more parts at the end, but even I can't remember them now, and Max is done talking about it. Dreams are so wonderful and frustrating at the same time, how we can't really recount most of them, how it seems like you almost figured something out, but then the more you try to remember it, the faster it disappears.

It's been sort of a dream-like state around here, and we've accomplished very little. The wind is blowing, the leaves are falling off the trees at an alarming rate. I am staring at the gray sky from our office window (which is actually a door, come to think of it).

We've spent a really quiet day around the house, drawing pictures, watching movies, playing Super Mario Sunshine. The last few days have been really low-key, and I have dubbed them our "post-depart'em depression days," owing to the strange feeling of emptiness since our friends left on Monday, as well as the rather nasty colds that arrived as soon as they left us. Otto had a fever on Tuesday, but it was polite enough to leave after 24 hours. However, he's still feeling icky, and we've all just started coughing and joining in to the general state of feeling unwell.

Otto made me a necklace on the morning he had the fever: he had put out the supplies the night before, and his plan was to do a bit of beadwork as soon as he woke up, so even though he awoke feeling absolutely blah, he went straight to the table and made me a necklace. He has been very happy that I've been wearing it everywhere (and by this, I mean to the kitchen and to the bathroom and to the living room) since he gave it to me, and he helps me find a place to hang it each night and then reminds me where it is in the morning.


We tried to get out and about yesterday, as it was a beautiful sunny day (it almost reached 70 degrees, although it stopped just short, so that October could continue to be record-breaking in any way possible: record colds, record in the fact that it hasn't even hit 70 degrees on any single day). I wanted to be a responsible person and not take my kids somewhere to expose other kids to our germs. We were just walking around, soaking up the Vitamin D, and we stopped by Holstein Park, where we had gone a couple of times with Fergus and Effie on their visit. It was only 1:30, the perfect time to visit a park on most days, as it is before school is out, and after all the young kids have gone home for lunch and naps. We usually have the park to ourselves at this time. But we were disappointed to see that it was absolutely packed with a bunch of kids wearing blue and white. We were confused, as it was apparently a whole school out early or something, maybe because of the good weather (fun for them, of course, but not so good for us). Also, this particular bunch of kids seemed determined to have a fight break out amongst themselves, and there were blows between a handful of students at least three times. There was one really tough girl who seemed to be trying to pick fights with anyone who looked at her the wrong way. I thought they were perhaps on recess and would leave within 15 minutes (Chicago public school recesses are notoriously short), but they stayed around for longer than that, took over the entire playground, and there was no teacher or adult in sight.

Not so much because I felt bad exposing them to our germs, but more because I felt uncomfortable exposing us all to their really angry behavior, we left the park and walked home. It was a pretty brief outing, but at least we got some time in the sun. Today is rainy, and the forecast promises the same for the next several days. Good days to stay home and watch movies and make s'mores in the microwave. Almost as good as the real thing.



Oh, and speaking of the real thing, check out this marshmallow and hot dog roasting equipment. Perhaps for the next camping trip?