Our Living Room that's Full of Life

As I've been printing, organizing, and storing years' worth of family photos for my card catalogue photo drawer project, I've noticed a pretty glaring pattern:

There are a LOT of photos of my kids.

That, in itself, isn't a problem, because I do want the kids to have lots of photos of their childhoods. The problem is that there are MOSTLY photos of my kids. There are barely photos of Matt. There are barely photos of our house and yard and the places that we frequent. There are barely photos of our friends and family. There are even more barely any photos of me.

So that's one of my resolutions from now on--to use my photographs to keep a better record of our lives. And in the spirit of that resolution, I'm not just deleting this quick snapshot that I took of the living room in order to test my camera lens that's been acting wonky.

I'm annotating it!

We've definitely got plenty of mess on display. Post-lunch, the kids neglected to clear their plates. Post-art, the colored pencils are still on the table. Post-music, there's that keyboard, and it looks like it's even still on, just running the batteries down!

We've also got tons of negligent housekeeping going on. I should figure out how to make the kitties stop scratching the couch corner. I should take down the paper chain and update the kids' artwork. I should get rid of those magazines, because lord knows the last time that I looked at them.

There is life, though, in this messy, negligently maintained living room. The keyboard and laptop are from Syd's keyboard lesson. The catnip mouse is Gracie's favorite toy. The workboxes and files show just how important our school is to us.The easel is part of the kids' display for the Science Fair later that night. They built the snap circuit radio over the weekend, and haven't stopped listening to it since.

I also love the stories that this photo tells. That morning, Will colored a picture from her gargoyles and medieval monsters coloring book, then showed it to me. I noticed the caption that said it was a gargoyle from Rouen Cathedral, and exclaimed, "Hey, I've been there! And hey! So have YOU!" I got down the photo album/travel journal that I made after our trip to France when Will was eight months old, and found the page from Rouen. Wouldn't you know it, I have a photo that I took of THAT gargoyle on THAT cathedral!

So there you go, Kids. Our living room was super messy while you were growing up. You didn't clean up enough, and I didn't organize. We all spoiled the cats. But you can definitely tell that we did a lot of living here in this living room.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Homemade Award Ribbons and My Clean House

a tutorial for the award ribbons that I made for the spelling bee that I ran last weekend

and a discussion of the disinfecting wipes that I made using the homemade disinfectant recipe from Homemade Cleaners

My house is NOT clean today, but there are two happily drawing children at the table with me, Tchaikovsky streaming from the computer speakers, a boiled chicken carcass in a pot on the stove (to be dealt with by Matt + children after he gets home from work tonight), and a mass Facebook messaging dialogue going on right now to decide where my friends and I will meet up to gossip this afternoon while our kids play, so life, clearly, is going just grandly regardless.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Infused Vinegar and Rustic Weddings

a review of the book Rustic Chic Wedding

and a tutorial for making homemade infused vinegars for cleaning

These infused vinegars are something that I've been doing for quite a while, and it's really fun. Now whenever I've got something a little strange in the pantry--the rest of the package of whole cloves that I'm pretty sure has already sat on the shelf for a year, yet another batch of peppermint thinned from the garden after I've already filled an entire gallon jar with dried peppermint--I look it up to see if it has any disinfecting or other cleaning properties, and if it does, then I infuse it into a Mason jar of vinegar. The jars look pretty, and they can basically sit out at room temperature until I want them. It's a double win!

We're actually swimming in clementines right now, so one of my goals for the day--along with making a couple of etsy orders, writing lesson plans, and finishing an excellent book that I started last night and then didn't want to put down for bed--is to start a half-gallon jar to infuse clementine vinegar. 

Sitting on the windowsill, facing the outside that tomorrow will reach 9 degrees at the HIGHEST, the jar of orange-hued vinegar at least *looks* sunny.

Spooky Windows

We've got a little bit of Halloween zest going on at last:

Ignore the dirty windows, because that's all on the outside, and I just do not have the desire to haul my butt up on a stepladder with a spray bottle and a squeegee so I can show you cute windows (also, the last time I did that, the girls somehow had the windows smudged within the hour, and it broke my heart). Anyway, our decorations consist of kite paper papel picado from The Toymaker (printed onto cardstock at 1/4 size, then traced and cut out), kirigami spiderwebs from Omiyage Blogs, and bats from our own imagination, crafted with bilateral symmetry in mind. 

Here we've got more bats, a hand-colored cardstock papel picado pennant, and a kite paper spider from Green Baby Guide.

And now, as I write this, Will has twice mentioned that she'd be happy to wash the outside windows for me. Of course, this means that I have to drag the ladder out of the garage and over to the front windows, set it up, collect the gear and set it out, do the top panes of the windows myself since she can't reach them even with the ladder, then drag that ladder back to the garage when she's done, but the result, whether or not I feel like throwing a bag of sandwich bread at the girls for dinner and then passing out when I'm done, will be clean front windows...

... at least for an hour.

Yes, I DO Pick out My Kid's Clothes

Not the younger one--she has better taste than I do, by far. In fact, I should start getting HER to pick out her sister's clothes.

But yep, the older one. I actually pick out my eight-year-old's clothes for her.

Here's the thing:

1. Will doesn't wear clothing by choice. She hangs out naked (for most of the day) until someone makes her dress, and then she puts on the absolute minimum that she can get away with. 
2. Absolute minimum means ABSOLUTE minimum. Unless you specify socks and underpants, and then double-check that they're there, she won't bother putting them on. Normally, I don't care, but I draw the line at personal injury, and I'm weary of discovering, mid-hike, that the child has put on her jeans commando, or finally finding out near the end of our sledding adventure that she's put on her snow boots without socks. I know that a lot of parents would tell me to let Will teach herself with those blisters and frozen toes, but not ensuring that she takes care of her body feels differently to me than, say, letting her test her physical limits by climbing something that she might fall off of, which I have no problem with.
3. When she is required to dress herself, Willow doesn't care what she wears. She prefers comfy, elastic-waisted pants, and she does not prefer the pinks and purples that are heavy in her hand-me-down stash currently, nor does she like dresses or skirts and tights, but she'll wear whatever is easiest to grab from her clothing storage. She finds it VERY frustrating if she is required to search through unsorted clean laundry for something.

Until a few weeks ago, the girls kept their tops and bottoms on hangers--each kid had her own rod--and their socks and underpants in drawers. Lately, though, I feel like I've been on an organizing kick, or rather I've somehow found some extra energy to start rethinking chronic sticking points and finding solutions to at least a few of them. And my clothing re-organization is making me VERY happy.

I gave all of the clothing rods to Sydney. She carefully thinks out each outfit, so she might as well have the extra space to really look at all of her options. I moved all of Willow's clothing to drawers, and I no longer require the children to sort and put away their own clean laundry. Instead, I do it for them: I hang up Sydney's clothes on her rods, and I package Willow's clothes like this:

Pants get folded in half and laid out. On the middle third of the pants I stack a shirt, a pair of underpants, and a pair of socks. I fold the pants up around the bundle, and put it in Willow's drawer.

Now when someone finally tells her to go get dressed, Willow can simply grab a complete outfit out of her drawer--if the underpants are right there, she puts them on, and if the socks are right there, she puts those on, too. I think that somehow the packaging is encouraging her to dress herself in all the items of clothing, not just the minimum that she always chose when she had to select each item individually. Hallelujah!

 As you can obviously tell from the photo above, I don't spend much time carefully matching items, either, and Willow still feels pretty disdainful about the idea of clothing, in general, but next time I start griping about how tedious and frustrating and full of annoyances my life is, please please PLEASE remind me that my older child will now dress herself completely in all the clothes required by polite society.

As long as I pick them out for her, of course.

Polishing with Lemon Juice and Salt

You can take the girl out of Montessori, but...

Actually, I don't remember if Will learned how to polish with lemon juice and salt from Montessori or from me, but either way it's such a Montessori-style activity that whenever she sets it out for herself, it reminds me of her preschool afternoons spent at our local Montessori school, rolling out work rugs and carrying activities on trays and sitting on the ellipse to sing the friendship song.

Tangentially, if you're ever looking for a preschool, but have the long-term goal (or even just the possibility) of homeschooling, then I can't recommend a Montessori preschool highly enough. Montessori children are encouraged to be so independent, and so focused in their work for long periods, that they're practically tailor-made for homeschooling.

Anyway, sometimes of a morning Willow will decide that my teapot is looking especially grungy (In my opinion, it's ALWAYS looking especially grungy, but I also never polish it, myself, so I don't have much room to criticize). When that happens, she'll take it to the table, then set out for herself a little dish of salt that she gets from the cabinet and a little dish of lemon juice that she gets from the refrigerator, and a dish towel.

She wraps a couple of fingers in the dish towel, then dunks them first in the lemon juice, and then in the salt.

And then she rubs away the grime!

You can see EXACTLY where she's polished, on account of my teapot is otherwise so grimy.

Polishing with lemon juice and salt takes surprisingly little brute force, although you do build up your muscles through that repetitive motion. I'm especially happy when Will chooses to polish something, because she's still such a reluctant writer that I know that any extra bit of muscle-building in her hands and arms can only help.

And no, she never polishes the entire teapot! Whenever she's done, I remind her to wipe down the teapot with a wet dish cloth to rinse it, and then she puts away her supplies and runs off to do something else.

And then I'll just put the teapot back on the stove top with the clean spot facing out.

Such an improvement!

Little House, Pioneer Life, and Using a Washboard

We school year-round, and I'm already regretting not scheduling more "summery" studies that are best done here in the heat and the sunshine. We did a flower study, sure, but how great would a whole botany study have been, right there in our garden? Or a solar power study? Or some engineering, done with PVC pipes and the garden hose?

Fortunately, our pioneer study has been pretty well-timed. I know that much of Little House in the Big Woods, which we've been reading out loud to each other as part of our school mornings, takes place in the winter, but all of the pioneer skills and crafts that we've been doing together to add context to our readings make for good summertime activities.

For instance, Syd has goofed around in the bathtub with the washboard before, but this time, with the girls REALLY using the washboard, outside is just so much better. Washboards are splashy and water is exciting, don't you know.

Since we're not exactly equipped to use a washboard exactly as the pioneers do, we first watched a video of a washboard being used at a living history park (there are actually a lot of good pioneer skills videos from Living History School, if you're interested--I'm going to be hand-grinding grain AND dying fabric using black walnuts, thanks to them). Then we headed outside with a plastic bin (what I wouldn't give for a big galvanized metal washtub!), our washboard, a chunk of Fels Naptha laundry soap, and, for the girls, one entire dirty outfit each.

Look at my hard workers washing their own clothes by hand!

And yes, Willow actually does SNARL at her sister in this video. My children are mostly feral, I'm afraid:

When each article of clothing was clean, the kiddo wrung it out, laid it flat on the deck and sprayed it down to rinse it, wrung it out again, and hung it on our backyard clothesline. When they were dry, we checked them out--Sydney didn't do a great job on her outfits and they were sent inside to be washed the conventional way, but Miss Willow found herself with a perfectly clean, spic-and-span, washed by means of her own muscle outfit to put on and pose in:

That's a Momma-made tank top there!

And later that day, when baking (and liberal tasting, apparently) caused her to get chocolate just all over her shirt, I sent her outside, where the washboard and bin and soap remained, to hand-wash that shirt all over again and hang it up to dry. 

It sort of made me idly wonder exactly how cruel and unusual it would be to have each child wash her own clothes by hand every day. I mean, just one day's worth saved me from having to wash the same shirt twice, AND stain-treating it for chocolate!

DIY Laundry Soap: An Update

When the girls and I started making our own powdered laundry soap a year and a half ago, people had a LOT of questions, and even more opinions:

• Would it really be cheaper than purchasing detergent?
• Would it really get our clothes clean?
• Would it fight stains?
• Would our clothes become dingy over time?
• Would it ruin my washing machine?

Today, 18 months later, I've got all the answers.

1. Is making our own powdered laundry soap cheaper than purchasing detergent?

Yes and yes and yes! Although I haven't kept track of how often we wash how many loads, I will tell you that in early January 2011, I purchased one box of borax, one box of washing soda, one tub of Oxyclean, and two bars of Fels Naptha; that, plus baking soda, is what I use to make our laundry soap, sometimes using my homemade bar soap instead of Fels Naptha. I've been using only homemade laundry soap since I started, and I gave a Mason jar full of homemade laundry soap away at Christmas, and I haven't run out of any of those original supplies yet; price the cost of those supplies in your area, estimate how much laundry I might do for my family of four each week, and you can get a pretty good estimate of what you'd save.

As for me, I'm thrilled. When I first started making this soap, I estimated that it would cost 3 cents a load--for me, it actually costs SO much less when compared to purchasing conventional detergent.

the kiddos making a big batch of laundry soap last week

 2. Does homemade laundry soap really get our clothes clean?

Yes! No matter whether or not I use Fels Naptha or my homemade bar soap, our clothes come out of the wash clean and fresh. They smell good, and regular dirt and food (oh, those girls!) disappears.

3. Does homemade laundry soap fight stains?

Nope, not at all! Unlike conventional store-bought detergents, this homemade soap seems to have no stain-fighting power. Regular dirt and spills and whatever wash out, but mud, and spaghetti sauce, and other stains that deeply penetrate the fiber of the cloth don't. Fels Naptha does better at getting out grease stains than my homemade bar soap does--I know this because I saw more of that type, in particular, coming out of the washing machine when I used my homemade soap--so it's possible that there's a soap out there that would work really well at stain-fighting, but neither of the bar soaps that I've tried have much to offer in that regard. I'm okay with this, both because I'm saving a crazy amount of money with this homemade soap, and because I can still get rid of the stains completely, but just with a little more work. I treat all stains as soon as the item of clothing is removed for the day by wetting the stain, rubbing a bar of Fels Naptha onto it, and rubbing the Fels Naptha in. I also pre-soak stained clothing for several hours by putting a bucket in the bathtub, scooping in a couple of tablespoons of laundry soap, filling the bucket with water from the tap, and submerging the stained clothing in it. Finally, in the summer I try to hang laundry to dry on the line--not every load, but every few loads, so that everything gets hung dry at least a few times during the summer--to sun-bleach everything.

Mind you, this is only necessary if something is truly stained; most of our clothing, including normal spills and stains, wash out without extra attention.

the jar of laundry soap that lives in the bathroom, used for pre-soaking stained clothing

4. Have our clothes become dingy over time?

Nope, not at all! We have an he washing machine, and I'm pretty militant about clean rinsing, anyway, so I put vinegar in the rinse agent compartment every time I wash, and I set my machine for a second rinse every time, as well. I don't know if that's the secret, or it's our water quality, or what, but nothing is dingy, not even our whites.

5. Has homemade laundry soap ruined our washing machine?

Most of the criticisms that I've received on my posts about my homemade laundry soap have had to do either with dingy clothes or broken washing machines. A lot of people seem really afraid that homemade laundry soap will ruin a fancy he washing machine. If homemade laundry soap had ruined my washing machine, I'd totally tell you, but our machine works fine. Mind you, Matt occasionally cleans out that pipe thing that runs from the washing machine to the wastewater pipes, because we have such pathetically crappy plumbing that we have to really be on top of its maintenance if we don't want to pay to have our main line unclogged every month, so if that's the part of the machine that people are worried about then it does get cleaned regularly (which Matt would do even if we used conventional laundry detergent), but since I've never really heard what people specifically think could happen to a washing machine that uses homemade soap, and I've never heard from anyone who actually had their washing machine ruined with homemade soap, all I can say is that ours is fine!

Conclusion: I'm really happy with our homemade laundry soap. If I learned of a recipe that claimed to fight stains better than ours does, I'd try it out, but I wouldn't consider going back to conventional detergent.

The Ballerina, and Her Bun, and Thoughts on Organization

It's a new year of ballet, and the ballerina finds herself quite eager and prepared:

As the girls grow older, it's been such a relief to be able to gradually give up the exhausting chaos of their tiny years (they're 22 months apart, remember? I yawn just thinking about those days...) and, with their help, actually develop a system and an organization for some things that make our lives so much less stressful.

Take the pink ballet uniform, for instance:

The leotard and tights (the same as last year, thank goodness for stretchy fabrics!), get checked over when Syd gets home from class, hand-washed if they need it, and then put back in Sydney's ballet bag. The ballet shoes (brand-new from the dance store, leather shoes are NOT very forgiving) can go straight into the bag. Generally, Sydney isn't permitted to wear her ballet shoes outside--photos are a special occasion.

Sydney isn't permitted to wear her ballet uniform to play in--it was very expensive, and she has plenty of other leotards, some of them nearly identical, to fuel her at-home ballet daydreams--and so being permitted to run around outside in full uniform, near a fountain, no less(!), was pretty fun:

Being basically the butchest mom on the planet, the ballerina bun has been one of my biggest fears for a long time. I bit the bullet this year, however, and to my surprise...that damn bun is easier to make than a braid!

I've since decided to skip the netting, since I don't bother to slick the rest of Sydney's hair back with gel and spray, but even so the bun is sturdy and simple and attractive, and I've even begun using it to pull the girls' hair up when I want it out of their faces during the week. Who knew?

It's only since I've seen how easy even getting ready for ballet can be with a child who is organized, capable, and responsible for her own gear that I've begun to feel less bad about sending the girls to Montessori when they were littler with tangled hair, dirty faces, no socks, and lunch eaten in the car on the way there. How on earth did those other parents send neat and tidy small children out into the world every single day, on time and with a hot, healthy lunch in their tummies?

Really, however, my greatest revelations ought to concern how to apply this study in organization to all the other remaining areas of overwhelming chaos in our lives. A gymnastics bag, for instance--we'd know where the gymnastics leotards were even before it was time to get ready to go, and Willow might actually be able to find her gymnastics shorts for a change! And if each girl only wore her gymnastics leotard for gymnastics, then perhaps we'd be spared the desperate search among the play leotards each week to find one that fit for class...

And surely there is some sort of simple way to fix a child's hair so that the dratted ponytail doesn't dig into her skull during forward rolls?

And Then We File Them Away Neatly

I have no context for the following picture, except to note that this is my typical view when blogging or editing photos or writing lesson plans, or otherwise attempting to work on my computer: Picture the computer keyboard directly under the cat (whose name is Ballantine), madly pinging away with irrelevant commands, or perhaps picture the cat lying directly on top of one hand trying to type on the keyboard. If it's morning, change the location to the living room library table and insert an opened newspaper in its usual place directly under the cat, with the most interesting article on the page being the piece of the paper most obscured. This is how the cat ensures that I still love her, even though I have two human children, as well.

In other news, the girls and I have been goofing around a bit lately with our newest novelty--file folder games. We first saw the link to the free file folder games web site on Chasing Cheerios, but we've since become fans in our own right, downloading and printing out and making far more elaborate (vintage wallpaper and plastic laminate are required for nearly every paper craft that occurs in this house, apparently) quite a few of the games, including an alphabetical order game that uses pumpkins for Sydney and an animal alphabet set for Willow to spell with. There are plenty of math games on the site, as well, which I'm excited about because that's the subject that I feel like I'm the least likely to offer casual daily enrichment for the girls in.

Making and playing with the file folder games has served to get the girls interested in their assortment of paper and laminated paper games and playsets again, everything from simple laminated alphabet letters or animal silhouettes to play with, to a large variety of matching games--
--to the various puzzles or other activities that we've downloaded and then personalized together:

I've come up with a neat idea for a child-made matching game that I'm going to try out with the girls this week. If it works, I'm hoping we can use it for Christmas gifts for little cousins, and I'll post a tutorial and perhaps a template for the benefit of all the other little cousins out there in the world.

But the best thing that this new interest has led us to is a vastly better organizational system for these paper-based activities. Previously, I'd been storing each activity or set in a Ziploc bag on a shelf in the girls' room, where it soon gets lost and/or forgotten about. However, these file folder games naturally beg for a hanging file box to store them, and it was then an easy task to round up all these other playthings and assign them to file folders in the bin, as well. And THEN I moved each of the girls' random activity pages (nearly all of them from the free Dover samples that I get each week) from clear plastic bins to folders in the file box, so that now they take up less room!

I've read about some homeschooling families, unschoolers usually, who never have their kids do "worksheets." I even read one book by an unschooling mom, I forget which (tell me, anybody, if you recognize it from the story I'm about to tell), in which anytime one of her children asked to go to public school she'd give them some worksheets to sit down and do quietly, and they'd soon realize from this that homeschooling was way better.

I'm sorry, but I think that's messed up. Mind you, we're not homeschoolers, much less unschoolers, but we LOVE worksheets over here. I love crosswords and puzzles and brain teasers, and my kids love worksheets and activity pages and copy pages and sheets of math problems and whatever else they can do. I mean, I don't enjoy sitting and filling out my taxes or medical forms in triplicate or anything, but seriously, who doesn't love a challenging worksheet?

They're good for your brains, my friends. They keep you from getting Alzheimer's.

I Lost the Babies, But in Other Ways I Am Organized

Willow and Sydney had a playdate this morning because I wanted to get some work done. Specifically, I wanted to grade papers all morning, not read books and play board games about dinosaurs and see if the laminator will laminate leaves and playfight with sticks in the front yard and maybe watch a segment of Mythbusters--these are my favorite things to do of a morning, true, but grading papers? Must be done.

So we invited an adorable little schoolmate over to play with the girls, and there was much running up and down stairs and in and out of the house, etc.--your typical playdate. At one point in the morning, however, Sydney came in and asked for a snack, and so I thought I'd find Willow and the little friend and see if they wanted a toasted cheese quesadilla, too (the little friend claimed, however, that she isn't allowed to eat snacks at other people's houses, but that's a later story). I didn't see the girls upstairs, so I ran down to the basement playroom. No girls. I figured I must have missed them somewhere upstairs, so I ran back up and looked in all the rooms, calling their names. No girls. Now I figured I must have missed them downstairs after all, so I ran back downstairs, and looked in the bathroom off of the playroom and the closet under the stairs, calling their names.

No girls.

So now I think that they must be hiding, so I run back upstairs and look really well in all the nooks and crannies in all the rooms, calling their names sternly and announcing trouble to come if hiding places are not revealed.

No girls.

And now I start to panic. I think of all the places in which a mischievous hiding little girl or two could come to grief--did one girl lock another in a Rubbermaid bin made empty due to our recent organization, and then panic, herself, and hide? Could they have climbed into the broken dryer and then passed out? Emptied the chest freezer of food, hidden that food, climbed inside the freezer, and shut the door on themselves? Drunk a full bottle of hydrogen peroxide and crawled underneath the kitchen sink to die? I run back downstairs, like an IDIOT, and check the dryer, and the freezer, and the nook where the furnace lives, and the space around the chimney.

NO GIRLS.

And now I think, I HAVE WASTED TOO MUCH TIME. Whatever has happened, I have wasted lots of precious minutes running back and forth, while these children are in danger or dead. So I run back upstairs, heading straight to the cell phone so that I can call 1) 911 2) Matt 3) the little schoolmate's mother.

And as I pass the hall closet, which I have looked in at least four times in the past few minutes, I hear "gigglegigglegiggle." And from beneath the winter coats and behind the stroller and sturdy boots crawl Willow and her little friend, just giggling as hard as they can giggle.

And that's how I had my first heart attack.

In other news, the expansive organizational project of the girls' bedroom and our study/studio, the two messiest rooms in the house on account of they are constantly inhabited by three of the four messiest people in our family, is finished. I didn't finish grading papers this weekend, but I did finish putting all my favorite things, and all of the girls' favorite things, into clear plastic bins with sturdy lids. And then I labeled those bins. And, um, color-coded them. Because if you're going to do something, you might as well overdo it.

Here's part of the closet in the study:
You can see the bag in which I keep my teaching materials for my cloth diapering classes; the bin containing acrylic, oil, and tempera paints; the bin containing bulk colored pencils, the big jug of Mod Podge; the smaller box of plaster of Paris; four rolls of contact paper; the bin containing the one-inch pinback button machine and all its parts; the bin with all our hole punches; and the edges of small bins that contain seashells and artist trading cards. Oh, and at the very top, my brand-new and best-beloved Cricut, which I'll rhapsodize about some other time soon.

Here's another view of that same closet, if you can believe it:

You can see the big bin of bulk crayons, with our various pads of artist's papers stacked on top of it; bins of popsicle sticks, wooden cut-outs, and river rocks; the box of activated charcoal that, combined with the river rocks, goes into our terrariums; a bigger bin with all our paintbrushes; a small bin of pom-poms (and perhaps googly eyes); and bins of scrapbook embellishments and blank puzzles.

You probably can't see the labels on these bins, but every bin is labelled. And every bin has, below the label, one of three things on it--YES, NO, or WITH PERMISSION, and is underlined with either a green, red, or yellow marker. One of the main things I wanted to accomplish, as well as actually having a place to put all my crap, is to help the girls understand what materials they have access to. I take their roles as collaborators in our shared art and as artists in their own right very seriously, and I wanted to reassure them of what supplies they're permitted to use unsupervised, what they must be supervised to use, and what is off-limits. Basically, only the vintage beads, the jewelry findings, the soldering supplies, and the scrapbook embellishments are forbidden. The most important distinction in my mind is the WITH PERMISSION from the YES, or, for Sydney, the yellow underline from the green underline.

Bigger shelves elsewhere in the study hold bigger stuff:

Here are bins of blank papers, vintage papers, purchased scrapbook papers, scratched/warped vinyl record albums for crafting, and bulk markers. On top of one of the bins is a huge book of wallpaper samples--this is lots of fun for flipping through.

Even my desk received its fair share of attention, desperately needed, with a couple of nice, big paper bins labelled--

Although I'm not sure why I marked them NO--you'd think I'd welcome the help of anyone who wanted to do my paperwork drudgery for me...

I Go Over to the Dark Side

Goodbye, quirky vintage containers and lovely baskets made of natural materials. I wanted to be one of those cool crafters whose entire space is crafty, all personalized and unique and yet organized. Not so much SouleMama's craft room, exactly, because she's way too mellow for me these days, but definitely YummyGoods' craft space.

Only, those vintage containers don't really hold all my stuff, which I then pile on top of other stuff. And I'm really short, so I can't see what's in the containers above my head, which is pretty much three-quarters of the space in my house. And those lovely baskets of natural materials get dragged around by the girls, which is fine, but then also spilled and toppled and tumbled, and, you know, just all messed up.

So I've given it a good long haul, and I'm still going to utilize the awesome quirky vintage mason jars and chipped Fiesta ware and all the other random stuff that I've been trying to put stuff in, but 90% of the girls' toys and our craft supplies?
Clear plastic storage bins, baby. I've gone over to the dark side, and it's made of non-degradable petroleum by-products.

But you can stack these petroleum by-products. And see what's in them. And because you have to buy them new, you can buy them to fit whatever you want to put in them (this alone is novel and good). And they have lids. Sturdy, snapped-closed lids, enabling a three-year-old to carry, not a handful of crayons that are going to be left both here and there and everywhere even after officially designated "clean-up time," but the entire stash of crayons, upside-down if need be:

And they look like candy in there, which more appropriately models the role that crayons play for us here in this house.

Stay tuned for more clear plastic storage bin godawfulness as it occurs.

Sunday Update

I think I post often about the entity that is Sunday in our house. Saturdays, now--Saturdays are fine. We cooked, the girls and I invented a board game (more on that later), we hung out at the Wonderlab, did a little shopping (little-girl mittens at the west-side Goodwill), had dinner, and enjoyed Family Movie Night (Mary Poppins--Matt does an AWESOME Dick Van Dyke doing a cockney accent). But Sunday? Here we go...

The Nutcracker

As part of my attempt to make Willow into Someone to Go to the Theater with (This is the same kind of emotion, I think, that some moms feel when they talk about how they wanted to have a little girl in order to have Someone to Go Shopping with), I practically put a second mortgage on the house in order to buy the two of us AWESOME seats at the IU Ballet Theater's The Nutcracker in December. Because nothing is fun unless you study for it, not only have I checked out several versions of the ballet in book and DVD form from the library, including one ON ICE, and some Tchaikovsky CDs, but today while I soldered (see below), Matt took the girls to a public library program on The Nutcracker. The girls were thrilled by the dancing----although not quite as much by the craft activity: A crown, I think?

Soldered Glass Ornaments

Soldering doesn't really fit with my work ethic, since I can't manipulate molten metal with two little kids underfoot, but I obsessed about learning it at one point when I had lost my mind studying for my qualifying exams, and I still find it a lovely craft. Here are some ornaments I soldered while the rest of the family was at the library:
I've now used up the last of my pre-cut glass stash, though, and I find cutting glass with a hand tool VERY tricky. I believe I'm in the market for a second-hand glass grinder.

Officially a Big Girl

I had to be a bit insistent with Matt about this, but once we switched to a panties-only during waking hours policy, Syd seems to have finished her own personal switch to a toilet-only during waking hours policy.

In our house, toilet-learning is the first time that a kid warrants her own big gift, just for her. Will got a tricycle; I think Syd would like a whole lot more something like this

from Ostheimer Wooden Toys, but it costs Four. Hundred. DOLLARS!!! I'll be looking this week for something similar that I won't, you know, have to trade Sydney for.

For Hanging by the Chimney with Care

I think it's a total rip that stockings are for kids, so in our house we also do stockings for everyone, and so Matt helped me design a pattern (he drew, I nitpicked) for some stockings to sew out of felted wool. Here are three blocked and drying:

You can't tell in the photo, but the grey ones are really beautiful--they're from a cable-knit sweater, lightly felted, with the tops the finished bottom of the sweater. One will be Syd's and one I'll put in my etsy shop; the striped one is Matt's.

The Battle over the Table

The living room table, so recently moved (by me, with the back injury) to the lovely spot with the natural light by the window, was briefly shoved into a corner (by me, with the back injury) because Matt was being a dick about it, but my ability to throw a really big hissy fit (it's the redneck in me) with little to no warning fortunately trumped Matt's shove-everything-against-the-wall design ethic, and the table was moved back (by me, with the back injury) into the sweet spot a couple of hours later.

Parts of the House are Clean

Parts of the House are Still Very, Very Filthy

Can you even find the baby--excuse me, big girl--in the photo?

Panties are Prepared

I drew a pattern for the perfect pair of T-shirt panties today, only, T-shirt material isn't as stretchy as regular panty material, and you may not realize this when you put your panties on every day, but your panties stretch a LOT to accomodate your body, and all this is a preface to the fact that I need to tell you that the panties I make for myself out of T-shirts are ENORMOUS. Seriously, they're huge. Looking at them, they make you kinda feel like crying, but ooh, they are comfy.

So I cut out a ton for myself, and they are ENORMOUS, and Willow wanted some, too, and she wanted them to be "matches" with Momma, so Matt used his graphic design skills to cut down my pattern to fit her. The style is a little more adult than I'd choose for her--a little hipster, slightly cheeky--but seriously, something about the idea of wearing matching panties with my four-year-old...I could not resist. Here's the stack of Will's all cut out:

So yeah, our Sundays tend to be ridiculous. I'm exhausted, but you know what? Matt cleaned out the refrigerator today, and we totally have an unopened bottle of cheap champagne back in there.

I'm gonna go get it.

In Which Pig-Filthy Becomes Less So

In general, I have control over about 35% of my life. A few things I am very on top of, many things I'm handling okay, and most things are just going all to hell--what I'm on top of and what is going all to hell generally shift around a lot.

For instance, currently I am on top of my teaching--I'm past that beginning of the semester slump that had me so worried for a while, I'm feeling that my students enjoy me and are learning, and if I could just keep all their papers graded and get those four kids to keep their laptops closed during class, all would be peachy. I'm also happily on top of my blog writing--I'm a writer and a photographer by vocation, and this is a creative outlet that I'd missed since my undergraduate days. Our family has managed to eat home-cooked food for most of our meals for a couple of weeks, now--that's a big challenge for us, because neither Matt nor I enjoy cooking, nor are either of us particularly good at it. The yard, which often looks as redneck as our roots, is coming together for the fall with some lasagna garden plots set up and some shrubs moved to better locations and a likelier location for yard toys--it would be nice if Matt finally hauled away the trash he cleared out of the garage on LABOR DAY, however.

Things I'm handling--the children are happy and well-parented, though I always want to spend more time with them and focus on them more. Matt and I are paying more attention to each other with our put-the-kids-to-bed-early-and-then-order-out date nights; yeah, out-of-the-house date nights would be nice, but neither of us are wired to like leaving our kiddos. I'm getting some exercise and outdoor time, although more would be much better. My etsy shop is doing okay, although just okay. I've been able to spend some good time making things for my house and my family, which is nice for the nurturing, you know.

Things that are going all to hell--well, the house is pig-filthy, for one thing. Eh, not so much the house--the girls and I do a lot of work at the living room tables, so those are spotless. The playroom is pretty neat, and the bedroom and nursery basically just need to be vacuumed. The kitchen isn't as sticky or gnat-y as it can be. My study, however...well, I've had a busy couple of crafting months, remember? Remember?Oh, dear--have you lost all respect for me now? Mind you, I can see that this is a problem. I mean, this is supposed to be my creative sanctuary, my workspace, my mental clearinghouse, and my mental clearinghouse looks like...THIS? So yeah, I dig to the bottom of my big blue bin of fabric, dumping stuff out on the floor so I can see better, and when I find what I need I don't exactly put every piece of fabric back in the bin. The girls spend the morning coloring on construction paper and don't exactly put every piece of paper away when they're finished. Will didn't put her abacus back on its shelf after doing some math work. The grocery bag is full of paper for the recycling bin. That big grey backpack is my teaching stuff. Some of the other stuff is just...stuff.

That was 9:00 am. Here's 11:00:We did not go to the wonderlab for storytime, we've not gone to play in the leaves or over to the park, we've not made beer bread or peanut butter cookies. Hell, the girls aren't even dressed. But the study's a little cleaner, especially the closet and the bookshelf, which you can't see, and the lockers, and the cubbies on the left, which I want to move out of the room completely.

2:00 pm. As I uncover additional layers of stuff, I'm having to vacuum periodically, now. The fabric from the big blue bin is now stacked neatly in the lockers where it's supposed to go, the stuff from the lockers has been moved to the closet where it's supposed to go, I've reclaimed an entire level of the bookshelf from toys to books, and gotten rid of a LOT of recycled fabric that instead needed to be dishrags or just somebody else's fabric, frankly. What I have not done is read a single book to a single kid today, encourage anyone to eat a vegetable, wash anyone's hair, or, my personal favorite activity, MAKE anything today.

4:00 pm. Still cleaning, still drudging, now sort of ignoring some neighbors with whom I'm "friendly" but not friendly (you know? They're neighbors--you have to "like" them, but do you have to like them?), I watch my kiddo raking leaves and acting generally just adorable and seasonal and picturesque through my study window. I don't go out and spend half an hour snapping photos for posterity. Who am I kidding? Of COURSE I go out and snap a million photos! She's raking leaves!!!By 5:00 pm, it's game over for the day. I've got to jump in the shower, get dressed, get my teaching stuff together, and be in my classroom logged on and ready to lecture at 5:45. I don't have much left to clean in the study tomorrow, but I REALLY want to make tied tutus instead of cleaning, so if Matt wants to get an extra lot of date-night loving tonight (Romantic loving, gutter minds!), maybe he cleaned off my desk for me and swept and mopped the floor while I'm here at school? Maybe?

Nobody Can Call Me a Clean Freak

Yeah, yeah, yeah--I don't clean my house. Big whoop. 

I absolutely let a plate of uneaten spaghetti from last night's dinner sit on the table all day while I walk past it 800 times. 

When the kid runs by with a bath towel and spray bottle and announces, "I spilled the jam, but I'm a-gonna clean it up," I say, "Cool," and do not follow up. 

Every single day I angrily dig through a mountain of clean laundry up to my waist to find two socks for my kid to wear to school, and they DO NOT MATCH. Seriously, I'm over it. 

Events taking place this weekend, however, brought to light a very specific circumstance in which I do clean very well. See if you can find the pattern: I will happily clear off the floor, vacuum it, and then marshall the kids to help me mop with Murphy's Wood Soap... so that I have a place to lay out a quilt to be pieced:

 

This cleaning project is actually a biggie, because this section of floor has to be kept clean for DAYS--I have to lay it out to find a pleasing pattern, then after I piece it I have to lay it out again to attach the back, then after I stitch in the ditch each row and column I have to lay it out again to pin a new section, then I have to lay it out again to cut the binding to the right size, then I have to lay it out again to admire how awesome it looks when I'm done. 

That means that I have kept that floor section clean all weekend--I picked up the French fries Syd dropped, I wiped up the glue Will spilled, I vacuumed up the cat fur--it would seriously take all my freakin' time as a stay-at-home mom just to keep the freakin' floor looking good if I cared that much every day. 

Then last night, in a feat of strength and energy nearly unprecedented in this house, I untaped the butcher paper on which the kids have been drawing on top of the table for a couple of weeks, rolled it up and put it away (Hello, wrapping paper!), wiped the tabletop clean, blah, blah--so that today we could do this:

 

Um, and what is this, you ask? Well, we've just gotten back from California--this is our new ocean. The actual ocean material is some stash fabric donated by the kids' grandmother, and the kids have so far drawn on it--

--(Beluga whale, don't you know?)--and added shells from a big box I scored at the free day of the Monroe County History Center garage sale last year--

--and I printed and cut out and pasted together these photo-realistic fish and marine mammal 3D models from this awesome CD-Rom we checked out from the library last week--

 

and the kids added their toys, of course:

 

The rock that the seal is sitting on totally cracks me up. 

So the kids have been literally obsessing about this ocean all day, and it will probably be weeks before we can actually use our big table again. 

And sure, we did eat our dinner sitting on the floor again tonight, but the kids have also been poring over shell encyclopedias, and swimming their cut-out fish all around the house, and this morning, when a neighbor lady came running over from her house across the street because she saw Will climbing on top of the car and couldn't imagine that this child's mother knew where she was at the time (she and I hadn't met yet, obviously), she was greeted not only by the sight of me sitting on the porch steps cheering said child on, but also by Syd, naked, running around in circles in the yard shouting "HUUUUMP BAAAAACK!!!!!" over and over again. 

 Actually, I probably should go clean the house some more, in case Child Protective Services stops by for a little visit tomorrow. Should I show them the ocean?