Life is a Bowl Full of Cherries

Life is a Bowl Full of Cherries

a book of food idioms and silly pictures
by Vanita Oelschlager
illustrated by Robin Hegan



Monkey Business by Wallace Edwards was the older child's first introduction to a picture book full of idioms. And since then, we've come across a few. And now that the younger child is beginning to appreciate idioms and expressions peculiar to English, we read Life is a Bowl Full of Cherries for fun.

From the older ones like Flat as a pancake, Your goose is cooked, Pie-in-the-sky, to newer ones like The whole enchilada, Couch potato, and Big Cheese, the book showcases fifteen idioms with silly pictures as promised in the subtitle. One double-page spread per idiom states the idiom as well as gives an explanation and usage example at the bottom of the page.

A quick read, and a fun book. The trick is to get the kids to use these expressions as much as possible in the appropriate instances.

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[image source: Net Galley]

Plant a Pocket of Prairie

Plant a Pocket of Prairie

by Phyllis Root
illustrated by Betsy Bowen


I was chuckling heartily along with my daughter when I read the first book I came across written by Phyllis Root, "Looking for a Moose", when my daughter was just about two-ish.

And now, Plant a Pocket of Prairie gave me another way to connect with my now nine year old daughter and inspire her to preserve what's left of our natural environment.

What is a prairie? Most of us know it as the open grasslands of the Mississippi river valley where flora and fauna of all sorts thrive and form a tight eco-system that has been sustaining itself for years. Not many of us may know that it has been dwindling steadily over the past few years.

Once prairie stretched thousands of miles... starts the book, describing the lush meadows that was home to prairie chickens and five-lined skinks among other animals and plants; and then, moving on to state that it is Almost gone now to farm and town and city, even before we knew all the things a prairie could do.

As I read the first two or three pages of the book to my kids, I noticed their squirms and wriggles of initial resistance for the subject matter. By the fourth page, they sat up and exclaimed, "I get it! We are adding on more plants and more animals are coming too!"

The book has a gentle message about bringing the prairie to life even in urban and suburban areas via careful planting and tending. Start planting "in your backyard / or boulevard / or boxes on a balcony" the book suggests in a practical way, because even small pockets of native plants can replicate the wider, larger habitat.

Plant foxglove beardtongue
A ruby-throated hummingbird
 might hover and sip and thrum.

While exotic names like foxglove beardtongue, Joe Pye weed,  and hairy mountain mint certainly kept us smiling, this is not a gardening book per se. It is rather a fanciful flight into what might be if we took a small step towards restoring the environment for the creatures whose territories we have usurped over time. From the small critters, all the way to bison will be back if they have a place to come back to.

The woodblock illustrations are beautiful, giving a back-to-nature sort of unspoiled feel as if we were in a meadow.

Back of the book has a map showing the extent of native prairie from 1847-1908, as well as the tiny blotches of its much-diminished spread as of 1987-2011. How to Plant a Pocket of Prairie section suggests various ways to explore and understand the prairie. Sometimes called "upside down forests" due to the deep roots of many prairie plants, there is more biomass underground than above ground in prairies. There is also a section devoted to the animals and plants of the prairie with brief notes about each.

While it is heartening to read the verses suggesting that planting purple coneflowers will bring Dakota skippers and swallowtails, it doesn't happen overnight. We have a few white butterflies gracing our garden (thankfully we don't have any cabbage family plants in the garden this year) and the kids know first-hand the joy it brings to them.

And, when the kids stop at our purple coneflowers in our small yard hoping to catch a glimpse of a butterfly or a bee, I am glad this book has in some small way inspired them to carry the message forward.

[Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book. But the opinions expressed here and the decision to share it here are my own.]

[image source: University of Minnesota Press]

Home-grown Organic Fresh Apple Cider

The Jonagold apple tree in our yard yields a reasonable amount of fruit every other year. This year was the good-yield one. Since we don't use any pesticides, many of the apples were happily visited and inhabited by codling moth and beetles, and quite a few squirrels and birds helped themselves as well. Finally, it seemed like it was time to harvest the remainder.

Sensing a lesson in there somewhere and a chance to work together as a family, we embarked on a joint effort to pick the apples and make fresh apple cider. Everybody had a job to do and within 3 hours we had a gallon and a half of fresh apple cider - the fruits of our labor.

Kids and Papa picked the apples, sorting them as best as they can.

The youngest filled a colander at a time with apples; dunked the colander in a handy bucket of water to rinse the apples; then brought it to Papa at the table. Papa used the apple corer to core the apples, while the older child and I sorted through the cut sections to discard any yucky pieces and save the good ones.

When all the apples were cut and sorted and ready, Papa juiced them in the juicer, while I did an initial filtering to extract fresh cider and store in the fridge.

And now the small and unassuming little tree stands barren, getting ready for fall, and another year of minimal yield.

How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA

How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA

by Marjorie Princeman



So you want to make a cherry pie. What do you need to get started? Well, flour, salt, and a bowl would be a good start. Also, rolling pin, pie pan, measuring cups, spoons. Cherries too. But, what if you don't have it all handy? Well, you can go to the Cook Shop. What if the Cook Shop is closed for the July 4th weekend?  Well, then you better start from scratch!

Start by going  to New York, but get dropped off at the corner of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Look for coal mine to get coal to make steel to make the pie pan...

You get the idea. We go from place to place in the wide open country and find the raw materials needed to make the things we would use to make the pie.

A companion book to How to make an Apple Pie and See the World, the book takes us on a journey around the USA by riverboat, taxi, train, and plane, celebrating America in a playful adventure. And we get a recipe for cherry pie, of course.

[image source: betterworldbooks]