May Day

MAY-KING CHANGES:  This morning I was reflecting on the fact that it's the first day of the month of May, and out of the blue it made me think it would be fun to use that opportunity to use this month to "May-ke" some changes to our daily routine.

We've all been sick for almost a month now, and we're sick and tired of being sick and tired. We can't control the viruses we encounter as we're out and about, but we can try to get healthier, so we are better able to combat them. 

So, to that end, we're going to make sure we exercise every day. We've actually been pretty good about this, but we're going to make a Must Do daily in May (and hopefully beyond).  So that's once change. Second, I thought it would be fun if every day this month, we brought some kind of produce into the house that we've not had at home before.  And third, we're going to try to mix up our routine - not going to our normal haunts all the time. We need to explore more!

Today, we went for a nice long walk (check mark number one), we tried a new-to-us Japanese place for dinner, and our produce of the day was a coconut, which comes with a challenge, of course! How do you get that thing open, especially without wasting any of the delicious coconut milk inside?

Annabelle set to researching the problem, which was great. I hadn't even thought about the educational component of introducing new produce daily!  She watched a number of YouTube videos with different ideas for getting the hard shell open. One that looked fast and easy involved a drill, however, we thought using power tools would be cheating. Instead, we settled on a corkscrew approach.  

The video instructed viewers to find one of the "eyes" or circles on a coconut. Apparently that's a more vulnerable spot. We found one, and the kids twisted away at it. Christian pulled the plug out, and voila! Coconut milk!

 The kids drank every last drop.

Then, we moved to the alley to take a hammer to the thing.

The kids were quite pleased with their hammer work.

Annabelle also found a fun coconut quiz, which we took together. One of the things we learned is that the coconut is actually a seed, not a nut, per se.

In other news, the Japanese restaurant we tried had an intriguing menu item: goldfish ice cream. According to a South Korean food blog I found, the treat is a rice wafers in the shape of a goldfish, with vanilla ice cream and sweet red bean paste in between.  Apparently it's a riff on a popular Korean street food, boong uh bbang. You can see a photo of what goldfish ice cream looks like in the package here: http://southkoreanfood.tumblr.com/post/24694278554/samanco-ice-cream-south-korean-ice-cream-a  

Here's what ours looked like out of the package (and cut up). The kids report it was one tasty fish!

All in all, I think our May-ke a Change campaign has potential for lots of positive. Stay tuned - tomorrow is kumquats! :)