Joninės

Happy St. John's Day! This is the midsummer folk festival celebrated in Lithuania right after the summer solstice. We are studying Lithuania right now, so my oldest daughter gathered grass and flowers from the yard, and we all made wreaths. The girls wore them to a park where they launched the wreaths onto the surface of a duck pond.

Joninės wreaths

Yemen Fortnight

We are finished with our fortnight of studying Yemen. Among other things, we did the following to learn about life there:

• Ate mangoes, saltah (national dish of Yemen, eaten with a condiment made of ground fenugreek), honey, dates, yogurt, cardamom rice, etc.
• Listened to Yemeni music on YouTube
• Watched a movie on Yemen from Amazon and learned about Socotra (like the Galapagos islands as to remoteness and unique flora and fauna, but located in the Indian Sea) from YouTube videos
• Visited a spice store and did a scavenger hunt for spices used in Yemeni cuisine (fenugreek, pepper, coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, etc.)
• Bought some frankincense incense sticks and burned part of one
• Toasted spices and ground them with a mortar and pestle to make hawaij, a Yemeni spice mixture
• Cooked several dishes using hawaij as the seasoning
• Recited poetry to each other (poetry evenings are a common evening entertainment in Yemen)
• Learned about oil exploration at the Hunt energy exhibit in the Perot Science Museum in Dallas, Texas (petroleum is Yemen's primary export and approximately 25% of its GDP)
• Imitated the Yemeni sport of camel jumping by having my kids and their cousins run and jump over each other's backs
• Learned about social issues such as child brides and the current civil war in Yemen (we visited friends and family for a week, often sleeping on cots or the floor, so we could show the children what life is like for a displaced person fleeing civil war)
• Learned how to say "Good appetite!" in Arabic: bil-hanā' wa ash-shifā'

Yemeni Food

While Yemen is not a wealthy country, its cuisine benefits from its location near India. They make heavy use of coriander, cumin, and cardamom. Some of the Yemeni recipes we've been eating this week have been delicious. My husband--a Midwesterner who kindly tolerates all my cooking experiments even though he would just as soon eat pizza, lasagna, and deli meat sandwiches all the time--really liked the cardamom rice I prepared yesterday. He would actually like me to make it again, which is a rare request coming from him.

If you're looking for Yemeni recipes, I recommend the website Queen of Sheba Yemeni Foods. It's in English and has clear instructions and helpful photos for many Yemeni recipes. Besides the cardamom rice, our family has enjoyed hawaij (a Yemeni spice mixture which we toasted and ground ourselves), banana milk (banana, milk, a little sugar, and almond+vanilla flavoring all in the blender) and a rose lemon drink (basically lemonade with a little red food coloring and some rose water).

Welcome to summer 2015!

It's summer! The girls' school is out, so we're not doing "normal school" until the middle of August.

The summer school curriculum is our usual (third summer now) of learning all about countries plus math and maybe religion or music a couple days each week.

These are the countries we are learning about this summer:
1) Yemen
2) Lithuania
3) France
4) Peru
5) Taiwan (dd5 wanted to do China, but I have a rule that we can't repeat countries within five years; as Taiwan's status is hotly debated, the choice of Taiwan can satisfy both her desire to learn about China again and my rule)