Salmonberries, Tall Mans, Tickling Spiders, Sunshine Soup

Last week, at 7 pm on Tuesday evening while Rob was out late at badminton, I decided to forego an early bedtime for the kids and take a walk to the secret garden - our name for a nearby greenbelt. I convinced Lucy to take the walk by promising we would wade through the creek as far as we could. We were rewarded by finding our first salmonberries of the season growing along the side of the creek. Lucy was so excited and we have since been finding salmonberries frequently and she eats tons of them. The berries come in lovely, enticing colors of yellow and red, but then really don't taste all that great - a little bitter and somewhat sour. Jasper, who usually eats anything, does not care for them, but he does enjoy carrying a berry or two in his hands for quite some time. But Lucy loves them. And the next time we go picking, she wants us to bring Daddy with us or any other "tall mans" we know so that we can get those beauties way, way up top.

Speaking of tall mans, Jasper is still learning his own strength when it comes to insects, worms and other tiny creatures. He desperately loves them and when he sees them, he wants to pick them up, caress them, generally try to make friends. This attention usually works out if it is a beetle, a ladybug or a worm. Last night, as he was sitting upstairs buck naked except for his rainboots, he spied a spider and started to gently tickle it, saying "tickle, tickle" in the high-pitched voice he usually reserves for talking to babies. This did not work out very well for the spider. Sometimes love hurts...

I've been making a very simple blended soup for dinner for the kids recently, containing onions, carrots, and cauliflower. The first time I made it Lucy asked what it was and I had to think fast. If I have learned anything as a parent, it is this: do not say a blended soup has cauliflower in it. In this scenario, it is truly worth it to slightly obfuscate the truth. So, since the soup is a pretty yellowish-orange color, I told her it was sunshine soup. She was intrigued and asked what I put in sunshine soup. I said, oh, sunshine, stardust, dandelion seeds and buttercups, for extra color. She loved this, and while she wolfed down the bowl of soup, we discussed exactly how one extracts such things as sunshine and stardust for soup preparation. Every time I make the soup, we explore these topics further and have come up with many interesting methods (always while the children are slurping up the soup). Last night, Jasper finished up his bowl and then said to me "More sunshine soup, please." Needless to say, I considered my victory complete...

Below is a pic of Jasper doing what he does when we say "Jasper, smile!" It helps to know that Lucy also used to make faces like that, but now, when we ask her to smile, she looks like this: