Back in the Saddle

It feels good to be back in the swing of things, still home recently enough that daily life doesn't yet seem like drudgery. After all, I've been able to CRAFT again! I put aside schlogging away at my Ravenclaw house scarf until booth-sitting at my next craft fair, and made some real recycled crafts in the last couple of days. I finally thought of a use for some little panels my mother cross-stitched on recycled denim:

And since it's nearly the end of summer (sigh), I'm running low on my wool sweater collection, so I sewed up a few of these babies out of pretty much my last big pieces of felted wool: Do you recognize this doll as the handknit Ecuadorian sweater I scored at my Goodwill Outlet expedition?

The girls seem to have settled back into the routine here pretty well, too, which is nice, since they were starting to get pretty crazy those last couple of days in California. We went to the library for Say it in Spanish with Miss Nancy, a superstar who can breastfeed baby Mateo while singing and playing her folk guitar, and we checked out the following items:

• Eyewitness: OceanDVD
• Born to AddCD
• Echoes of Nature: Ocean Waves CD (I think it has an actual recording of the waves at Pebble Beach!)
• Reading Rainbow Seashore Surprises computer program
• Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
• Lemons Are Not Red (Ala Notable Book(Awards)) (Neal Porter Books)
• Fish Clip Art CD-Rom
• Colors in Nature: Yellow
• Triceratops Gets Lost book and CD
• A Busy Day for Stegosaurus book and CD
• Velociraptor: Small and Speedy book and CD
• An Alphabet Of Dinosaurs
• Orange by Sarah L. Schuette
• Seashells by Adele Richardson

Can you tell what the girls are interested in this week?

After school I wanted to engage the girls in an art project so I could clean, but nothing I suggested (decorating paper bags to use at my craft fairs, painting on butcher paper, drawing pictures on cardstock for thank-you notes, etc.) struck their fancies, so I ended up printing out dinosaur coloring pages from Geoparent. Filling in coloring pages is a really lousy art activity, but it can be a pretty good activity for other learning objectives--map work, absorbing how different dinosaurs look, associating words with letters, etc.

And then I cleaned, and then we went to the post office to mail an etsy package, and then we went to Goodwill, and then we got pizza, and then we watched our ocean documentary, and now Matt is putting the girls to bed while I gear myself up for putting my textbook order in at the IU Bookstore. I really should get on it, because school starts in, you know, two weeks. But it is a loathesome activity, and now I think I will put it off until tomorrow.

What activities do you find loathesome?