Lavender/Lilac

Phoebe wanted to make soup for dinner, using some rosemary she picked in the garden. She even got out a pot and put it on the stove with the rosemary in it, but I got out a bigger pot and started dinner in that. We had a head of cauliflower that we hadn't gotten to yet, so I decided on cauliflower soup and even found a recipe for rosemary cauliflower soup...which I loosely followed.

We decided on a whim to add some red cabbage to the soup. Quite a lot, actually. Because one head of cauliflower isn't going to feed a family of seven and we had some red cabbage in the fridge. 

Plus, it was bound to turn the soup a delightful pinkish-purple, which felt very springy, very Easter-y. 

Phoebe was very pleased with the light purple we ended up with after everything was blended together. But then I decided that it could use a little more acidity. So I grabbed a lemon and squeezed it into the pot and...

We were surprised—and Phoebe was particularly delighted—by the lovely pink colour it turned! I had momentarily forgotten (or had simply not been considering) that boiled red cabbage acts as a pH indicator!

This bright pink is telling us that the lemon juice was acidic. 

Had I put something basic in the soup would have turned green, or even yellow...and...well...at that point we probably shouldn't be eating the soup because basic things will kill ya! 

Once we had the lemon juice all stirred in the soup wasn't nearly that bright pink, but it was a much more lively purple than it was to begin with. 

Miraculously no children complained about this meal. 

Zoë thought the colour was delightful (and everyone else doesn't usually complain—no offense, Zo). Phoebe had multiple bowlfuls but at one point got hung up on eating naan (which we had with the meal), so I reminded her to also eat her soup. 

"Eat some of your soup, Phoebe—it’s pink!" I said, "Or purple...or something."

"Magenta?" Zoë offered. 

"Not magenta," Rachel said. "More like lavender."

 

“I call it lilac!” Zoë gushed, and then clapped her hands over her mouth.

"Hmmmm...did you have fun watching Austenland from the stairs?" I asked. 

Rachel and Miriam wanted to watch a movie last night after I got the younger kids to bed. Evidently Zoë invited herself to take part.

"I did!" she seriously. "It was a very good movie!"

("I call it lilac" is a line from the movie after someone says that something is lavender.)

Here's Phoebe and Rachel enjoying some "rainbow time" while I was getting Phoebe ready to hop in the tub (and Rachel was gearing up to go to the store to get some sour cream so she could make some cookies she wanted to make):

And here she is enjoying the bubblebath I told her she could not have. She's always emptying the shampoo into the water to make a big ol' tub of bubbles. There were literally three empty shampoo bottles on the side of the tub and I had to go get a brand new one from upstairs. She plays with the empty bottles...and I...lost track of which ones she had added to the tub...and the brand new bottle was one of the ones. Before I knew it there were just so many bubbles! 

I was looking around, counting the shampoo bottles floating in the tub or sitting on the side of the tub and realized that it was the new one that was missing. A quick little fishing expedition revealed the bottle, which I put on the side with a little eye roll (stop putting the shampoo in the tub, Phoebe!). 

Rinsing was a real adventure.

She eventually got soap in her eyes (while she was trying to eat bubbles like a puppy) so that about pulled the plug on bath time (pun intended).

Once in her jammies—and after throwing a huge fit because the neighbours invited the kids for a fire night...and I said that the kids could go until 8:30 but that Phoebe could not go because I had just given her a bath and didn't want to have to give her another bath (and we had just had a fire night with them on Wednesday evening)—we settled in for some stories.

One of her picks was Empty and Me, which is in both English and Persian/Farsi. 

I only know a few words in Persian/Farsi—for example, I know that برف (barf) means "snow" because we would get...barf-scented laundry detergent...in Egypt sometimes (imported from Iran, apparently). It took us a minute to figure that out. Snow in Arabic is ثلج (thalj), so nothing remotely close to برف (barf). And also...what does snow even smell like? 

I'm not sure. I guess...fresh. 

Like, the way Americans try to bottle sunshine into laundry detergents. 

What does sunshine even smell like?

Anyway, that's one of the only words I know in Persian/Farsi (I keep using both terms because I never know which to use), but I've been working on Arabic on Duolingo lately and my reading skills are getting much better...so I sounded out the story in Persian/Farsi and read it in English.

I have to be honest—I thought the story was going to be a depressing tear-jerker, but it actually ended up being quite a beautiful, hopeful, healing way to look at grief. 

The word خالی (khali) in Persian/Farsi means "empty" or "vacant" in English. It reminded me of the word خَلَصْ (khalas) in Arabic, which means, like, "that's enough" or "finished" in English...which gave me the same kind of vibes as خالی (khali), but I don't think the words are related at all (which makes sense since the languages themselves are unrelated...but it just sounded like a word that had perhaps been shared/borrowed at some point...but that is not the case).