Food Adventures

Today was Harry Potter's birthday, so we celebrate dat camp with chocolate cake and quidditch in the garden, and lots of care of magical creatures time...chickens and milking the goats. we also made some defense against the dark arts pom-poms and received lots of correspondence from dumbledore and harry through our owls. of course, we also read some of the book for snack and lunch time! im still working on my hagrid voice milking got our creative juices flowing and some of my campers propose that we have a goat spa day, to clean and paint their hooves and to give them a good wash. we also have coined the term "milksage" to describe the massaging of the udders that we do at the end of milking to get all the last milk into the teat in other camp news, yesterday was a big day of process over product: we created some burnt meringues because piping turned into smearing meringue into a think layer and i didnt think to adjust baking time as drastically as i should have. we a...

Week 2, and the adventures continue! I've been a little tired lately, I think its the cloudy weather. Each morning I just want to snuggle in bed for longer!! We have really caught the harry potter bug in my camp group, and I spent 30 minutes on Monday waiting for some campers to get picked up and fully immersed in some HP role play. We all have owls, we sorted a camper into her house, and then went to diagon alley to get her a wand and an owl. Today we put our magic to work casting a spell over the ducks, aluminia protectora. We are also on the lookout for he who shall not be named, and are concerned that every time it gets colder its because of him. we also have been playing some quidditch, we have 4 seekers though. im a beater, like fred and george ;) They know that Ive read all the books and are very keen that I tell them if Snape is good or bad, but ofc Im not spilling any beans (spoiler alert, the world is gray and nothing is a binary ahhh!) We've gotten a bit polit...

This camp session has been very different than last, and I feel like I have so many things to share! Which is a good thing, it's because I'm so pleased and excited with how things are going. Not sure how to fit it all in but here are some camper moments of the past few days as we continue to explore water, science, and interacting with nature and each other in kind and mindful ways thought-provoking camper quotes: why does people fighting to make the world better? sometimes i cry when my daddy goes hunting bc it makes me sad that the animals have to die did you know that someone is dying right now? and someone is being born? and someone has covid? and someone is getting married? silliness: they have lots of conspiracy theories about frump the fairy, who made a walkie talkie call to us the other day !! we hypothesize that the goats figured out how to pick the lock which is why they keep escaping they like to observe dingleberries (poop stuck to poophole) trying to sav...

I've been intending to blog since Monday bc there is oh so much news! This week I have new campers and I am loving it, very much reinforcing that I have a preferred age group. I tumble around with 6 small girls and 3 small boys and my purple stuffed turtle named Pebble Plum (plum is her nature name) and we are having a blast! It may take us an hour to do a hike that my last group did in 10 minutes, but I don't think that's a bad thing and we are actively learning about drought tolerant plants and singing our team chant along the way! We howl at the coyote brush and make monkey sounds at the sticky monkey flower plant. So much to share! I'll focus on highlights Perhaps what tickles me most is that these gals are on my level for the hydrate and pee game! Many of my campers go pee about 5 times in the camp day, sometimes within the same 20 min span. It takes us about 15 minutes to get started each morning bc we all stand in line to wait for the port-a-potty. Later in the...

today was my last day with the first batch of campers! it feels weird to see them go, and know that i'll likely never see them again. i am sad, but also really excited for next session with younger kids (4-7!!). for our final day we spent a lot of free time and some final game time, so it was a somewhat chill day....although we were on the rocky side of the beach at high tide, which was somewhat nerve-wracking because i didn't realize how many rock climbing opportunties there were and spent much of our time there hovering over the one 6 yr old in my group bc he was really into climbing and i was nervous about the scrambling resulting in injury. luckily we all made it out in one piece! we made a fire today, which was a nice end to camp, and i tried to have them do skits...but they were basically improv stories bc they werent very invested in it. ah well normally camp friday's have a "farmer's market" component for kids to show off what they've been maki...

here are some things i think i should report the whale watching has been incredible. spouts and fins and even some breaching! also harbor seals my campers found a dead juvenile great horned owl on monday while we were milking :( i eat a lot of vegetables. dinner tonight was a stir-fry that took up an entire cast iron skillet, and the contents were 1 head of broccoli, 1 rather large summer squash, 1 small onion, 1 small potato, and a large mound of chard (like 6 leaves about 2 ft long each). also a bit of tofu. seasoned with garlic powder, cumin, chili powder and paprika. did i eat all? just about! i am a veggie garbage can made some sourdough cornmeal plum muffins the other day teamed up with another teacher and made steamed buns using up mustard greens! little pillows of joy, received good reviews its a little darker in the morning now that its cloudy weather and that makes getting out of bed a little harder

friday and its the end of the week! this was water week and we ended our closing circle with another poem circle. dirt is brown and smells salty lobsters are good and yummy anyway, butter is really smooth and gross rivers dont gurgle but oceans dont either creative juices? i am also working on embracing playing games and finding educational moments in them as opposed to trying to get kids to do explicitly lesson type activities because they dont respond great...yesterday a camper straight up told me "i give this game (activity) two thumbs way down," which was an opportunity for us to talk about how to give constructive feedback. oof. yesterday we made potting soil! i think that was a good tactile activity although the older girls didn't want to get their hands dirty. i tried to tie it into the water theme by talking about things that contribute to soil moisture, ie the coconut coir we use that holds 10x its weight in water, and compost that contributes soil org...

What's new? The slow death of my right hand continues. While the poison oak bubbles have died down to the point of being blobby red patches instead of pus-filled bubbles, I've added some new bubbles in the form of burns from oil burns. Oil burns? It happens when you fry a mountain of vegetable tempura! There may also have been a tiny bit of hair singeing in the process of getting used to the gas stovetop lighter situation, but we all made it out with our eyebrows! This was NOT with the campers, this kitchen adventure was my first cook night! Me and my partner originally planned to make thai basil tofu, but we are out of tOFU! Yikes. So we made a coconut lentil curry with basil garnish, tempura, rice, and salad with peanutty dressing. It was a lot of fun to cook together and folks were most appreciative, but I also feel like I may smell like oil for a few days now. Also, my mission to work through the molasses began on Sunday night, I made ginger cake! Today we switched ch...