Touring the Norfolk Botanical Garden with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring the Norfolk Botanical Garden with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The weather stayed clear for my sister’s visit to Norfolk (Virginia).  We drove to the Norfolk Botanical Garden, which sits on 155 acres of peninsula on Little Creek.

This was my first visit to this tourist attraction located ten minutes away from our apartment and five minutes away from Florence’s school.  We chose to walk through the garden instead of taking the train or boat trips through the garden.

We made the right choice.  The Japanese garden had lots of big rocks at the entrance.  Traditional Japanese gardens are made with vistas in mind; there are photo opportunities everywhere you stop.  The Japanese garden alone is worth the price of admission to the Botanical Garden.

There is also a Colonial Garden here that has many flowers and herbs growing that were used for home cures.  We discovered that St. John’s Wort is good for warding off the “evil spirit” in the Colonial Garden. 

There was a large rose garden here that smelled wonderful in the hot and humid weather thanks to all the antique roses. 

Florence and I would visit the rose garden every day after school when I got a membership for the Botanical Garden from my sister as a gift.  We would check out the blooming board and look at other flowers and then have a small snack at the café.  They had a wonderful gift shop, too.

I still like visiting places with botanic gardens thanks to Norfolk (Virginia).

By Ruth Pennington Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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How the French Comte de Grasse Helped Win the Revolutionary War by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

How the French Comte de Grasse Helped Win the Revolutionary War by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I washed dishes while Laurent collapsed into bed after a long week on the ship.  Then, I ironed clothes, swept the floor, and checked on what Florence was doing outside.

When that was all done, I curled up in bed and read Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames in French about the mythical origins of Paris, France’s Printemps Department Store with its stock on shelves with the same price for everyone listed on a shelf next to the item.

Florence came in and out of the apartment and finally sat down to read.  I picked up books at library book sales, used bookstores, independent bookstores, and chain bookstores over the years, so Florence had a nice library.

I went into Florence’s room and wrote down sentences on paper and taped them to the walls for her to practice reading.  I sat at her kiddy table with chairs, and we read sentences that described objects in her bedroom.

When Laurent woke from his nap, we decided to do some sightseeing close to home and went to the First Landing Seashore State Park.  We walked over bridges in the swamp area complete with drooping Spanish gray moss.

One of the educational billboards said that cottonmouth snakes were native to the area.  The mosquitos chased us away from explaining the swamp fully to Florence.

We went to 64^th Street Exit and watched a boat launch into the narrows of the Chesapeake Bay.  Florence amused herself by trying to pull oyster shells off of the rocks.

We drove to the beach. It was 75 degrees outside and sunny – my Wisconsin weather vane still had a hard time registering that this was October weather in the South.

Laurent had the great idea to picnic on the beach.  We took out our picnic basket and spread out our tablecloth.  I loved our wicker picnic basket with real China.  Florence liked playing in the surf.

On the way home, we stopped at the Cape Henry Lighthouse.  We took a picture of the cross at the First Landing Site where Captain Newport first came ashore in 1607.

We learned from a historical marker here that the French Comte de Grasse routed the British at Cape Henry in 1781.

General Cornwallis could not receive any food, because the Comte de Grasse cut off supplies at Yorktown.

Cornwallis, the English commander during the Revolutionary War, had to surrender, because he could not feed his troops or his officers.

Laurent left for another two-week cruise later that week.  I came home from dropping Laurent off at the ship and played the card game War with Florence to teach her which numbers were bigger than the others. 

The higher number wins in War.  I left in the face cards, so Florence would learn their numerical values for games like Euchre (also called Napoleon) to make fast smear plays.

When Florence got tired of playing Euchre, I did sneaky teaching by asking her questions like “How much bigger is seven than five?”

She was working on subtraction at school, but I wanted her to be able to do quick calculations in her head, so I worked with her at home, too.

We did easier games, too, like checkers, pick-up sticks, Mille Bornes, dominoes, and tic tac toe.  If she had her friends over, I would set up the living room for Duck, Duck, Goose and teach them string games like Jacob’s Ladder, how to snowflakes from paper cutouts, and make butterfly paintings with finger paints and a sheet of paper. 

We ate real popcorn with Parmesan cheese from a can sprinkled on the popcorn and drank lemonade.  Various moms and dads would come in. 

I sent people home with bags of popcorn and told them to just follow the directions for the kernels they bought.  Virginia is a peanut-producing state, so I made my homemade popcorn with peanut oil. 

I liked the education, games, and snacks we had in the Norfolk apartment.  I learned how to organize a pantry in Norfolk and make menus for the following week based on what I found at the grocery store and what was in the pantry.  I did not want the ghost of Comte de Grasse to come and starve me!

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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A Milan (Italy) Rallye Created by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

A Milan (Italy) Rallye Created by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

I wanted Florence to know about Milan, Italy’s fashion, food, and newspaper industry even as a child, because I loved Milan’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. 

I consider Corriere della Sera to be one of the best newspapers in the world for news on the arts and culture coverage.  I absolutely struggled to learn to read Italian to read this newspaper and can do it now.  That is a lifetime goal of mine that I checked off after reading Gelb’s How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. 

So, when we were in Norfolk, I subscribed to Vogue and Glamour magazines and went through the ads with Florence.  She liked Versace and Armani like I did, too. 

I eventually subscribed to Junior Vogue along with Nickelodeon and People in English for Florence.  She could read at a young age thanks to those magazines.

I wanted to do a Milan lunch and made steamed carrots and puréed them with olive oil, dry garlic, chopped flat-leaf parsley, and red wine vinegar.  This was my Italian version of a Libyan hummus-like spread. 

I made toast and cut them into fourths and then put this carrot purée on toast squares.  These looked lovely stacked up on a plate like a pyramid. 

I served this appetizer with lemonade when Florence was small, but adults might like what some wine enthusiasts describe as hay-flavored Sauvignon Blanc with them.  Chilled Pinot Grigios and Rosés would go well with this appetizer, too.  I might remove the vinegar, though, which clashes with wine. 

I talked with Laurent and Florence as I stirred the basic risotto Milanese I made with butter, chicken stock, and mushrooms.  I made these sides to go with T-bone steaks for everyone. 

I asked Laurent what he thought about risotto.  “It’s soupy rice.  I want sheet, pan-baked potatoes with onions and Italian seasonings,” he said.

“A lot of those cookbooks are just PR,” he commented.

“I know, but I like trying to make foods from other cultures and parts of the country.  It is good for Florence to know about other cultures.  Technology just seems to speed up the process of cultural misunderstandings with language sometimes,” I told Laurent.

I did not use the Internet, but knew just getting a catering order done to satisfy people from different religious, cultural, and dietary, political preference backgrounds could be a grueling process let alone collaborating on engineering projects.

During lunch, Florence recited a poem about fall that she learned at school.  It was a cute, Japanese haiku poem about leaves turning color and falling to the ground in fall.

Laurent and I applauded and yelled “brava” and “encore” as she recited the poem a few times more times to general acclaim.  We asked her questions like “Why do tree leaves change color in fall?” and “Which leaf color do you prefer and why?” after each poem recitation.

We turned on some samba (street music) and bassa nova (fancy apartment music) from Brazil after lunch.  We all got up and danced for an hour.  (Italians definitely dance at home dance parties, so we did our Franco-Italian rallye at home.)

After dancing, I read Florence the book The Furry News: How to Make a Newspaper that described articles, ads, and circulation.

Florence took an old Virginia-Pilot and pasted some drawings in it. 

“Do you have anything to advertise?” she asked me.

“Can I advertise mom’s taxi service for 50 cents?” I asked.

She agreed to these terms and made me give her fifty cents.  She, then, called grandma and asked her to subscribe to her newspaper called – The Norfolk News for a quarter. 

I laughed at Florence’s business flair and asked her, “How many months can grandma get for 25 cents?”

“A long time,” she said.

We took dad to the ship for work.  On the way home, Florence said, “I like risotto and prosciutto.”

We stopped at the commissary and bought some chicken stock and other goodies, including a small bag of Arborio rice.  The rice was expensive, but they had it.

I improvised a risotto with chicken stock, grated Parmesan, pieces of chopped up prosciutto, sautéed mushrooms, and butter.

We listened to Laurent’s Ennio Morricone music and went out for ice cream cones dunked in chocolate sauce after lunch for dessert.

The ice cream place was across the street from our little apartment.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the 17th Century Adam Thoroughgood House in Virginia Beach by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the 17^th Century Adam Thoroughgood House by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of my family’s favorite places to visit in Virginia Beach (Virginia) was the 17^th century Adam Thoroughgood House, a colonial tobacco farm.  (Virginia is still a tobacco state, but they are trying to diversify out of the industry.)

Captain Adam Thoroughgood came to Virginia in 1621 as an indentured servant (usually 7 years of labor with room and board paid in return for freedom).  After he fulfilled his work obligations, he was granted more than 5,000 acres of land.

One of Thoroughgood’s descendants built the brick house with the steep roof in 1680 that you can see today.  The steep roof helps rain water drain off.

The Garden Club of Virginia asked landscape architect Alden Hopkins to restore the gardens in 1958.  There was no documentation of what the garden looked like in Thoroughgood’s time, so Hokpins chose to do the garden in what our tour guide called the Tudor Style.

The Garden Club is most proud of the espaliered fruit trees that are spread out like grapes on the vine.  There are also arched arbors in this garden.

The tour guide told us that “beasties” – little statuettes of an owl and squirrel, mounted on the poles were supposed to frighten away critters from the garden like Peter Rabbit.

Inside the house, the tour guide told us that the property’s location on the Lynnhaven River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay, makes it an ideal location for shipping the farm’s tobacco.

The first room in the Thoroughgood House that we visited was the kitchen with an open fireplace that was so large that you could walk into it.

The kitchen also served as the family room.  This has not changed over the years since colonial times.  Our guide showed us reeds and said that colonists soaked these reeds in oil and burned them for light.

Maybe this is the origin of the phrase “to burn the midnight oil.”  The reeds lasted about 20 minutes and were a fire hazard.

The living room had a fireplace as well.  The wood beams on the ceiling and molding around the top of the walls made this a more stylish room.  The most interesting thing in this room was the framed sample of quilling work.

Quilling sculpture is made of twisted paper.  The mahogany furniture from the 17^th century looked ok for business, but not for relaxing.

Upstairs we learned that colonial children slept on pallets that they rolled up in the morning.  This practice reminds me of the Japanese with their futons.  The master bedroom had a string bed holding up the mattress on top of it.

The expression “sleep tight” comes from having to tighten the string on one’s bed, so the mattress would not sag.

I was interested in the rail, thin ruffle iron and the box in which the ruffles were kept.

I ironed every week and was happy that ruffles like those were no longer in fashion.

Florence behaved so well during this visit that we went to the store and bought her some watermelon and bubble gum and let her smack it as loud as she wanted to.

At home, we made brownies.  I taught Florence different volume sizes with measuring cups and asked her, “Which cup holds more?”

While the brownies baked, I wrote about visiting the Thoroughgood House to the family elders and finished reading Waverly Root’s The Food of Italy.

By Ruth Pennington Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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