Veggies for the kids

It is amazing at times what happens in society. Here is Latvia we are undergoing a major economic collapse (?) , if negative, or transformation, if positive :) . During the last couple of years things were booming - land prices, house prices, clothes, food etc. Loans were abundant to the point where they had ads on tv where a family drove up to a fast food type window and the banker guy asked what the family of 4 wished and then gave them the cash and the happy family drove off. While this might be all well and good in most developed countries it was a disaster waiting to happen here where the folks did not understand the concept of loans, interest and what they will have to repay in the future. But I am starting to digress. The thing is this country and its inhabitants were up to their ears in debt, then the American thing happened, banks going bust across the oceans and then all crap started to hit the Latvian fan as majority of loans held by common folk and government (country) are owned by foreigners. The end result of this fiasco is not yet reached here, but in the intern civil servants salaries (which in many cases are more than the private sector's) are being slashed, teachers (almost all are public) have gotten serious pay cuts effective immediately (that was in summer), sections of hospitals closed, staff left off, big ups in the government system of course are fighting a reduction - I mean a teacher can have a salary reduced to 125 LS a month but an civil servant who earns 4000 Ls can fight a reduction... Anyway with that said life goes on and so do pre-school projects ( with less children this year as a couple of families bread winners are breadless), which brings us to the header. This week The kids and I had to get stuff from our garden (aka grocery store or neighours - as I did not attempt to do anything other than squash and pumpkin - the latter was not fruitful :( - and make "art" with them. After the initial moral outrage at wasting food in such hard times, we made a spider consisting of carrots and a celery ( so the shelf talker said), and a caterpillar make from the small onions. The eyes of both are make with beans. The mushrooms are potatoes with tops of apple The creations are stuck together with match sticks and some glue (the eye), and the kids happily took their creations to their respective classes.