Life On Acorn Hill

Sometime last year, I designated Thursday mornings as “cereal morning.”  Thursday is our Made On Acorn Hill work day —  I just need something easy for breakfast on those mornings.  Finding matching kid shoes is hard enough; this is not a day for a complicated breakfast.  The kids love boxed cereals (what kid doesn’t), and since I didn’t want them to eat that too often, I decided to designate cereal to this one day each week.  It’s a quick and easy kids-can-even-serve-it-themselves breakfast, plus another bonus:  one less meal to think about when planning the week’s meals. However, I began...

*originally published 11/9/2015*   We call it Flubber. There are many names for it on Pinterest:  flubber, slime, gak. Whatever you call it, it’s texture-play fun that little children LOVE. My kids love to play with it just like playdough, but it always illicits more giggles than the traditional yellow cans of playdough ever do.  Maybe it’s because they participate in making flubber …watching it and touching it and squishing it as it turns from separate, liquid ingredients into stretchy, slimy goop. Flubber can be made with or without borax.  We’ve made both and had about the same results.  You’ll need:...

  JUNE 27, 2017 We often get questions about making kombucha, and I thought this might be the best place to explain the process we use!  Kombucha is a fermented beverage that is a probiotic and said to boost immunity.  We drink it with lunch just about every day; the kids basically think it’s soda, and I really believe it’s helped our immunity since we’ve been in a consistently making it weekly and drinking it almost daily for over 6 months now. We’ve made kombucha for years, but I’ve gone in and out of making it as life has gotten...

 *originally published 10/19/2015*   Football season, our Autumn soap flying off the shelves, and pumpkin-flavored everything always cue Fall, and for me, the making of pesto is the final tradition to mark the end of summer and usher in Fall.  Each summer, at the very, very end, when the basil plant is lush and loaded, we pick it clean.  It’s always bittersweet to see the plant look so stark and stiff, naked of its green growth.  Its bare limbs are a foreshadowing of winter, and the fragrant, summer leaves go from the plant to the blender to the freezer in the circle...

 *originally published 4/15/2016*   “What’s that smell?” It wasn’t the smell of impending rain in the air, or a breeze blowing the scent of freshly cut grass, or the scent of mossy, wet earth… smells that you might expect to point out to your children on a nature walk through a park. It was the strong smell of laundry detergent and dryer sheets that hung in the air on the boardwalk trail through the woods. It wasn’t a bad smell at all, but it was strong enough to linger in the outdoor air even after the people had gone on down...