These are the moments that I truly cherish: baking the day away with my girls.

Serafina loves to get into everything as it is, but when we bake, she loves to get into the flour. And I mean INTO, as in arms into the flour bin and armfuls of flour scooped out onto the flour! No one can ever turn their back around here, not even for a minute, unless they want to turn back around to a giant mess. I knew that she would get into the flour, but I want to let her experience different textures and be involved in the baking and cooking too.

Today we made a new granola recipe, (Lemon Cranberry Granola, recipe post to come soon), Chocolate Chip Banana Bread, Pizza Calzones, and Quick-Rise Cinnamon Buns.

I love my girls to bake and use their hands to create. I believe that this is what we are here to do as human beings, to create and to share our beautiful creations with the world. For me that is recipes, photography and writing. For Craig, it is his music. For my mom it is making Waldorf-style dolls and knitting naturally crafted gifts and toys (hopefully she will start up a site soon). And for our girls it is painting, drawing, baking, and especially Rainbow Loom these days.

(Dolls homemade with love from Grandma.)

Both Autumn and Kesa follow Rainbow Loom tutorials on youtube and also invent their own designs. They both amaze me with their creations!

(Kesa’s little babies)

(Kesa’s Strawberry Shortcake kids)

(Elsa)

What creativity is stirring inside of you? What gift do you feel that you have to share with the world? If you can’t think of anything, maybe you are an encourager. Whatever comes to your mind upon reading this is your gift. Whatever it is, we are waiting for you!

“The human being is most perfect in the limbs. If you follow the sequence of the higher animals up to the apes, you will find that the forelimbs are not so very different from the hind limbs and that the main function of all four is to carry the trunk, move about with it, and so on. This marvellous differentiation of the limbs into feet and hands, legs and arms, happens only in the human being; it expresses itself in the predisposition to walking upright and having a vertical posture. No animal species is so perfectly structured as the human being with regard to the complete organization of the limbs.

The human beings hands and arms have become useless to the human body, and this is externally the most beautiful symbol of the human beings freedom. There is no more wonderful symbol of human freedom than these arms and hands. Human beings can work for the environment with their hands, and since they eat and nourish themselves, they can also work for themselves out of their freewill.

It only inculcates conceit in people if they are constantly taught that human beings are the most perfect beings on earth by virtue of their head. This idea causes people unwittingly to absorb the idea that the human being is perfect through laziness, through lethargy. Instinctively they know that the head is a lazy bones resting on the shoulders, not wanting to move about in the world but letting itself be carried by the limbs. It is not true that it is through the head, the lazy bones of the head, that human beings are perfect beings; they are perfect in their limbs, which are involved in the world and its work. ” — Rudolf Steiner, Practical Advice to Teachers