Reading, Listening, Cooking

Monday is typically our quietest day.  My husband and I share a car, and Monday is his day to drive (rather than bike or carpool) to work, so the kids and I enjoy a peaceful "home day."  I try to leave our time unscheduled, and we often have a leisurely morning spent doing all of the undones from the weekend list.  Folding and putting away laundry, cleaning the bath, trying to stock up the fridge with a few meals and snacks.  Thrilling, right?  No, not really, but it does feel good to prepare ourselves for the week.  This morning I spent a good hour in the kitchen whipping up a lentil soup for the week's lunches, a roasted-tomato, garlic, and portabello pasta sauce for dinner, and a double batch of apple-cinnamon-oat muffins for snacks.  Aya hung out in the Ergo, and Solomon stood beside me at the sink making "water soup" and "water muffins" (And hoo-boy, let me tell you, those were delicious.  The kid knows how to make an excellent water soup.)

I finally had a chance to flip through a stack of books I picked up at the Founders Book Fair last week.   Founders is such a great place to visit with kids  -- it's a historic park with many old storefronts, a bakery, a brewery, an old WWII aeroplane you can go inside, a playground, a train, a barn full of vintage buses and wagons -- the list goes on and on.  It also features an annual bookfair -- I picked up these six beauties before I was hurried away from the books (and toward the aeroplane) by my impatient toddler.  I'm not entirely sure what I'll "do" with them, but at 50 cents a pop, the bright covers were hard to resist.

 I'm also just about to finish up this lovely book -- an interesting combination of fiction and autobiography, gifted to me by my sister some time ago.   I've been reading up a storm lately; there's something about winter that just makes me want to crawl into bed, oh, around 7:30 or so and just read and read.  And music from this talented folksy singer-songwriter has been on repeat lately.  I just can't get enough.  (Find another favorite video here.)

**Coming soon -- a few photos of the new one-of-a-kind "Welcome" sleep gowns I've been working on.  That is, if I manage to tear myself away from my evening-long reading sessions, and get out to the studio....