For years my friend Karen has been inviting us to come up to her cabin in the U.P. and we finally took her up on the offer. After we arrived it took Miika about 48 hours to stop whining about boredom and the fear of bears and wolves. The remedy? A bag of peanuts and a fishing pole. The addiction to the white buzz of our urban home faded into the discovery of new little friends: baby bass at her toes and chipmunks taking peanuts from her fingers. After hours of communing with woodland pals, the hum of trains, Harleys, air conditioners, traffic, TV and playground buddies stopped tugging at her soul.

On day two, Karen presented me with a 3″ X 2″ piece of plywood and asked me, “If you’d like to paint or whatever the paints and brushes are in the garage along with stacks of magazines.” While taking in the woods, the lake, and quiet, I snipped, glued, painted, smeared and pondered. The novelty of skipping rocks in the lake and letting fish weave around their feet, kept Miika and Nathan content for an entire afternoon so I could work on a collage. What a dream…

Here’s what happened to the board:

Journal entry on day five:

I’m sitting among majestic pines watching the sun rise on the lake to a chorus of chickadees, nuthatches, chipmunks, crows and a distant loon. The day we arrived, we went across the road to pick wild red raspberries and discovered three pilated woodpeckers 2o yards away hammering at an old, rotted, buggy log. They were so busy that they practically ignored us while we filled the bottom of our bucket with berries.

We arrived in temperatures warm enough to enjoy a swim in the lake, but two nights of rain have delivered a cold snap that requires two sweatshirts to keep from shivering. It’s perfect weather for fishing which is what Miika and Paul have been doing for the past few days. Nathan goes back and forth between the deck where I’ve been painting and the lake, happy as a clam.

Yesterday we drove down to Eagle River and just happened to glance over at the Ace Hardware parking lot at the right moment to catch a glimpse of a bald eagle soaring low. Jaws dropped and hearts grinned. On the drive back to the cabin we spotted a small flock of wild turkeys and multiple ravens. So far, despite all the deer we’ve seen in the woods near the road, they’ve stayed out of the van’s path.

The primal lure of a bonfire kept Miika and Nathan up way past their bedtime last night. Finally after I dragged them in, put them to bed and sat down to read, the woods started to chatter and yip with countless canine voices. The black lab-pit bull mix next door couldn’t contain herself and barked the coyotes away deep into the forest.

As I sit here writing, I’ve made the acquaintance of a chipmunk who is quite comfortable pulling peanuts out of my shoelaces. The fifth nut has just been snatched and stashed away in his secret burrow under the steps that lead to the lake.

I’m dreading our return to the urban drone of ding-ding-ding, beep-beep, grrrr, humm. Perhaps I’ll wash a few dishes by hand back home while I look out the window beyond my Sesame-Street-like scene to the memory of a lake with a pair of loons accompanied by the whooshhhh of wind in the pines. I’ll be back Chippy….with peanuts on my shoe.

Back at the workshop after our hikes, each child stretched their engineering skills and built a RoboClock. Each robot was full of personality and functionality. For me, it is such a thrill to see kids expand their abilities and their minds.

Lily, I love that RoboClock! She’s adorable!

Some of the children had never been this close to a deer.

Today, I was blown away by how beautiful the girls’ acrylic butterfly paintings came out. Each canvas was made out of 1/2 of a cigar box and repurposed cotton cloth stretched on them and treated with matte medium. They painted the milkweed plants by dipping real milkweed into pink paint. The butterfly prints were made by cutting out cereal boxes in the shapes of butterflies, dipping them in blobs of paint, folding them in half and pressing them on the canvas.

Handmade jump ropes ruled the day! Braiding rags challenged fine motor skills to the max. Those who mastered it, helped the others conquer!

Today was day two of camp and we have a nice group of kids who are so eager to create and learn. We’re exploring our heritage, finding our countries on the map, making a book about we learn and listening to music from around the world. Kids are also learning to create handmade toys from the stuff we toss away. Today’s project was a bean bag toss game. Simple and fun!

Last week I went rummaging through a thrift store in Maywood looking for the perfect junk. When I brought the cart to the counter I felt like I needed to apologize or explain why I was purchasing such an odd pile of odds & ends which looked like the “FREE” box that you stick out by the curb after a garage sale. But it didn’t seem to phase the cashier. I was in a rough part of town and I suppose stranger people had come through this shop.

Well, it’s a week later and this little lady above is who has emerged from the heap. I’m gearing up for summer camp. In a few weeks, the first camp at the workshop will be “Hand, Heart, Heritage” where kids will learn where their ancestors are from, what music they listened to & the stories that they told. We’ll make handmade toys, and create little books for letterboxing  which is a quirky British hobby of hiding a blank book in the ground with a stamp and inkpad. There’s an entire society that does this, sharing stamps and notes with each other.

Next camp will be a Multi-media camp where kids will learn how draw and paint using all different kinds of media: watercolor, pencil, chalk, acrylic…. The highlight of the week will be producing a public piece of chalk art on the Union Pacific concrete wall near the workshop under the leadership of a new friend, Forest Park artist Doris Bartek. Our theme of the week will be “The Secret Life of Butterflies.”

And then comes Building and Nature Camp. We’ll go out and learn about nature, fill a nature journal with our findings and come back and build a RoboClock like Miss Rosie above. This camp is almost full. The other weeks are about 1/2 full. I’m SOOOOO excited! Now that Rosie is done, it’s time to hit the books and prepare…

These were eight-year-olds and we definitely pushed their skill sets over the edge. But I like giving kids something to reach for. I always test my daughter on projects before I spring them on a group. However, now she’s getting pretty good at everything and this is not my best gauge. Anyway, let’s just say we snarled up a few sewing machines, it was chaotic, but also a ton of fun. I love seeing kids get excited. Getting tangled up in thread is just part of learning.

This week was all about pillow shams and pillow cases. Above is Miika and buddy Sami fusing plastic bags together to form the backing for picnic blankets. The fused plastic is like thick plastic fabric. So we cut it to the size of the shams, sewed it together and the girls drew pictures on the back with permanent markers.

Whalah! Nice, little one-person blankets that keep keep you dry if the ground is wet or kinda dirty. Nice for the Memorial Day Parade. The only thing I forgot to do was add some string or ribbon in for tying and carrying on their shoulders. We’ll add that later.

As I watch Miika grow, I see such an amazing,  inventive little lady, precocious and full of independence. I am so proud of her. Miika is not a follower, she’s the lady in charge. Sometimes I just stand back in amazement as she instinctively takes care of Nathan when I’m busy. At the same time, she’s very much, simply seven. Loves bugs and “her” playground in front of our home. I call her “Queen of the Playground” because all the regular visitors know Miika. She’s kind.

All of that said, she’s far from perfect…perfectly imperfect perhaps. Tonight after supper, she informed me that she was going to fix my dessert. I protested a bit because I knew it was her way of pulling out all the stops on her own duplicate dessert…yup…mango icecream topped with M&M’s and Skittles with a strawberry on top. The bowl was VERY full.

I haven’t said much about my kids lately because I’m so consumed with working and getting the word out about the workshop. And it dawned on me that I need to celebrate them more. They enjoy the workshop but it’s a delicate balance. Nathan often asks to go to the workshop when we are home and when we’re at the workshop, he gets his fill of it and asks to go home. Miika’s the same way. But I feel good about that because my goal for them was to feel at home there…like an extension of home.

Lastly, I just have to mention that in the photo above, Miika is jumping rope with the rope she made by ripping rags and braiding them. Three 10-foot by 3-inch strips braided makes the perfect rope. Each section can be make up of several pieces. Just glue-stick them together by overlapping the strips by about 2 inches. This eliminates the knots. Miika takes this rope with her almost everywhere.

She doesn’t do pink, she’s done with “Hello Kitty”, the more bugs the better, and she loves a hike in the woods with just Mom. That’s Miika.