Pattern Play Paper Animals in the Playroom

I can't decide if I like these or not.

The kids and I got this book, Pattern Play, free from some publicist or another (fun fact: when you blog, sometimes you get random packages of free stuff in the mail. Usually I know who they're from, but seriously, sometimes I don't! Should I be concerned that anonymous publicists apparently have my home address?), and while we super liked constructing the animals--

--I was kind of freaking out as we were making them, because omg our house is so cluttered already. There is already so much crap on display, from decorative bean mosaics to layers of the ocean posters to potted plants to Harry Potter fanart to jars with colored sand layered in them to coconut monkeys to the freaking Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria!!11!!!! (and yes, I did compile that list from what's basically right in front of me as I sit here at our school table. I'm not even telling you about our table covered in school stuff and the entire wall of books and the keyboard and telescope AND camera tripod in the corner. Sigh...)

Where the hell are a bunch of adorable 3D stand-up paper animals supposed to live, I ask you?!? In bed with me? Next to the cat dish? On top of the dryer?

Or--ooh!--how about in a mobile hanging over the kids' computer? They'd flutter and waft in such a lovely fashion. We don't have any mobiles in the house! In fact, I've never even made a mobile before!

How hard could it be?

Uh...

The first couple of steps that I figured out were brilliant. We found the balance point for each animal as we were constructing it, poked a hole there--

--and threaded a piece of invisible thread through. Then we glued the two sides together, sandwiching the thread between them.

Not. A. Problem.

I bought a super thin dowel, and cut it into some pieces.

Totally doable. 

Then I tied a piece of fishing line to the dead center of the smallest piece--okay, that was pretty fiddly--and hot glued it in place.

Done and done.

The next step, as far as I could figure, was to hang an animal from each end of the dowel, right in the place where the whole thing balanced, and glue it in place.

This. Was. IMPOSSIBLE!

The thread was really slick, and didn't want to knot. I finally got a loop in each piece, then had Syd hold the dowel up by its thread while I balanced the two animals from it. Her arm got tired. I had to let go of the contraption to see if it balanced, but if I let go too much one end of the dowel would fly up and the animals would fall off. The thing would be unbalanced one way, but adjusting one animal by a millimeter would drastically imbalance it the other way.

How the hell to people make mobiles?!?

After a really, really, REALLY long time, I said to hell with it and Syd and I taped some animals, strung to fishing line, from the top of the high shelf above their window seat:

They still flutter and waft, but there was very little engineering required.

Another neat thing about this book is that after you cut each animal out, you have the rest of the patterned paper left to play with. When I was thinking of making my mobile masterpiece, I was thinking that we'd use the circle punch to cut out a lot of circles from the paper, then sandwich the invisible string between an entire line of them and also use that in the mobile.

Now, however, I'm thinking I might do the same thing, but maybe as a garland.

In other news, does anyone have a good mobile-making tutorial to recommend to me?

This is Why I Can't Get Anything Done

I've been doing a LOT of sewing lately...skirts, our fashion show dress, another dress, bloomers, two sets of fabric matching games, and after I finish the matching games I'm going to start on a couple of T-shirt baby bibs.

My sewing would go a lot more efficiently, however, if it wasn't for a certain cat named Spots:

This most gregarious cat will begin the morning by making the rounds of the neighborhood, catching one neighbor before he leaves for work in the morning and actually going into another neighbor's house, she confessed to Matt the other day. Who knows where else she goes and whom else she visits?

When her morning work is done, she climbs onto our porch railing, reaches out and puts her front paws on the living room windowsill, and stands there looking at us until someone goes to let her in. It never takes long, because a cat's stare through a window is quite disconcerting. Then she'll come find me, wherever I'm working--at the computer, with the girls, at the sewing table--and plop down for a nap in exactly the spot that makes carrying on with my work the most inconvenient. If there's no likely spot, she'll climb onto my shoulders, switch from shoulder to shoulder in front of my face, and basically refuse to stop until I hold her in my arms like a baby.

And then she purrs, of course.

Inside the Glue Gun

In retrospect, there was probably always something wrong with that pink glue gun, the one that burned so hot that when I accidentally squeezed hot glue directly onto the back of my hand almost exactly a year ago while helping the girls make Sydney's Trashion/Refashion Show wings, the liquefied glue immediately peeled the skin off and I STILL have those scars.

This past weekend, making the wire hanger hoop for THIS year's Trashion/Refashion Show, I kept plugging that pink hot glue gun into the outlet back in the study, and it kept blowing the fuse to that part of the house. Weird, but I have, like, a million things plugged in back there (computer, external hard drive, shop light, two sewing machines, etc.), so I moved all my work to the living room, set the glue gun down on the table, and plugged it into the outlet there.

That damn hot glue gun caught fire! Fortunately, I'd make a big enough production about moving my work that everyone in the family happened to be looking at me at the time, and so everybody got to see the gigantic blue flame shoot out of the little heat vents on both sides of the gun. Matt fetched an oven mitt and set the smoking piece of junk (see how I didn't say "smoking gun?" on account of I have too much pride?) outside on the concrete front porch to settle down.

I'm REALLY glad that I didn't happen to be holding it when I plugged it in, or, god forbid, one of the kids, because they use hot glue more than they use school glue. It was clearly a total fluke, so I don't even know what to do to prevent something like that. Buy a more expensive hot glue gun? Set stuff down before you plug it in?

After the hot glue gun had had time to get nice and cold from our sub-zero outdoor temperatures, Will brought it back in, found a screwdriver, and did what we always do with every appliance that breaks on us.

We LOVE to take junk apart!

The insides are a little blue because I tried that crayon trick once. Did not work:

Will reckons that the fire originated here. See how it's all charred?

Sooo...at least that was fun, right? And now I get to go hot glue gun shopping!

A Rose Dress Bodice Muslin, of Sorts

Yes, it's fashion show season again! This year, Syd designed a "Rose Dress," one whose details were a little on the light side this time around, since all her design sketches turned into grand "Sydney on the Runway, Framed by Lights and Surrounded by an Enamored Audience" sketches.

Although my main goal is that Syd take ownership of her design, I didn't push too hard for additional details since, just between you and me, this way it's a little more likely that I'll be able to actually create the dress. Suffice to say, the dress should be red, have a skirt that looks like rose petals, be sleeveless, have wings, and be just as short as I will let it be (and that's knee-length, poor kid).

I have an old bridesmaid's dress given to us by a friend, that I hopehopeHOPE will have enough fabric for the dress' bodice and outer skirt, but I'm trying to be extra careful with the fitting and patternmaking, to be sure, and thus I've been sewing up some practice components in quilting cotton as muslins, of sorts. They're not *real* muslins, because I can't stand to sew anything that isn't wearable on its own, but they do help me create/refine my rose dress pattern, so there you go.

This bodice, for example, comes from Little Girls, Big Style, a book that I LOVE for sewing for Sydney, and I am going to be really sad when she soon maxes out the sizing, sigh:

I used some stash cotton for the outside and the lining (playing for a bit with the idea of making it reversible, but thankfully I abandoned that unnecessary headache), and two giant vintage mismatched white buttons from my stash for the straps. 

Nota Bene: The night that I was sewing this bodice, Matt was out for the evening. He came back quite late, and still found me hunched over the sewing machine (I have terrible, non-ergonomic sewing posture, despite the fact that I sit on a yoga ball). 

"You're not supposed to sew after 10:00," Matt said. "You know you make mistakes." We created this rule after several late-night sewing sessions in which, yes, every evening ended with me making some critical, careless, late-night-induced sewing mistake.

"But it's not ME this time!" I griped. "THIS time there's something wrong with my buttonhole foot!" Indeed, I had been futzing with the damn buttonhole foot for nearly an hour by that time, and I just couldn't get it to work. Clearly, it was broken, or the sewing machine was broken, and I'd have to take it in to THAT sewing machine repair shop, and you know how I feel about that place.

Eventually, bribed with an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras, I did leave the broken buttonhole foot and come to bed. The next morning, walking by my sewing machine on the way to the bathroom, I looked over at it and thought, "Oh, I put the lever on the wrong side!" Problem solved.

And that's why I'm not allowed to sew past 10:00 pm.

The bodice fits perfectly snugly, but was inches too short, so Will helped me measure out and lengthen it:

After lengthening the pattern, and changing the straps (the back of the rose dress will have a zipper, so the straps will be sewn in and needed to look smoother), I've got a rose dress bodice pattern that I'm very happy with. Next, IF I can stop being sick for a few days--can you believe I got the norovirus this weekend?!? That's my third illness since December!!! Whine, whine, whine!!!--is a hoop skirt constructed from unbent wire hangers, and then a circle skirt to encase the hoop skirt, and two layers of petal skirts.

Oh, and wings.

Science Experiment FAIL

Pinback Photos Go Kaput

I'm still learning all about my new-to-me garage sale light tent. I tell you this to explain the following photo shoot:

Forty-nine photos, none of them usable, all because of the stinkin' glare. I didn't have that problem at all when I shot my previous pirate pinbacks, so more thinking and practice and thinking again is clearly required.

I hope it's nice weather again tomorrow...

Sydney Shines

Phew! Nothing like a nasty, mid-week stomach flu to take a person off of the grid for a while. No email, no Facebook, no housework, no book work, no craft work--it would be quite the refreshing break, if I didn't still feel about halfway this side of death.

Willow, fortunately, is fully recovered now, but she and I were both struck ill at almost exactly the same time, and were both VERY unhappy girls for a couple of days. Matt did as much as he could within his work deadlines, even skipping his drawing class when it became clear that I was NOT going to be able to cope, but Syd, my pampered, spoiled, sweet little baby of the family, was not only left to her own devices quite a bit (something that she is not used to, what with having a constant sister-in-crime at her disposal), but was also needed to help out quite a bit, and she made good.

While I was barely able to move, myself, in the next room, Sydney kept Willow supplied with water, dry cereal, Netflix, and plenty of snuggles:
I staggered into the room during one interlude to find Willow sound asleep leaning on Sydney, with Sydney still watching their movie and absent-mindedly stroking Willow's hair. When she saw me, she said, "Momma, can I get a blanket to keep Willow not cold?"

By Friday night, at least, Willow and I were well enough to be planted on the bleachers at the ice rink, holding each other up and swathed in blankets from home, while Matt handled all the preschooler-corralling so that Sydney could shine in another capacity:
The smallest skater in the Spring Ice Show may not have remembered her choreography, or consented to wear her costume (in the car later, Matt was baffled as to why Syd started to throw a tantrum when he tried to put on her duck outfit. I said, "I can guess. Sydney, was your costume pretty?" Sydney, from her carseat in the back, shouted, "NO!" Mystery solved), or even stayed upright for the entire time, but she does claim that she could see me in the darkened audience, waving frantically at her.

And I could not be prouder.

We Don't Wash Wool on Hot

Dear Matt,

First of all, thanks for doing the laundry. What with Willow barfing and all, laundry definitely needed to be done, and I'm glad that you stepped up. Did you have trouble finding the washing machine? I know it's been a while since you've used it, so I hope it's still in the place that you remembered.

I did want to mention again, however--remember when I showed you all the girls' nice, soft wool leggings that I spent one weekend sewing up for them? I sewed them from sweater sleeves, and sewed matching skirts, and they were super cute? Remember when I held them up and said, "Look at these leggings. They are made of wool. You cannot wash them on hot, and you cannot put them in the dryer. Look, here's another pair of leggings. It is also made of wool. Do not put this in the dryer, and do not wash it on hot," and you said, "Stop talking to me like I'm not smart!" and I said, "Of course you're very smart, but you also felted my nice, soft wool socks, and I do not want you to felt this pair of leggings that you are now looking at," and you said, "Okay, okay! Stop treating me like a child! I hear you about the leggings!"

Do you remember that? I'm just asking because--
--you felted the leggings. They are very small now. They are no longer Willow-sized. They're not even Sydney-sized. In fact, they might now fit Sugar and Nutmeg, the guinea pigs in the girls' classroom, and that's fun, because I was meaning to spend all weekend sewing those guinea pigs something nice anyway.

Anyway, thanks for doing the rest of the laundry, and Sydney didn't even notice that the skirt on her princess dress is a little pink now, what with being washed with red and orange and purple wool leggings. On hot.

Love,
Julie

P.S. You also put the down comforter in the dryer. There are feathers everywhere.

I Should Have Majored in Something Practical

Highlight of our weekend trip to Arkansas:
I do love to walk with my girls to my old elementary school a few blocks away from my parents' house. There are some new pieces on the playground, but most of the wood and metal equipment that was around in my day is still around, and is still super-fun. Matt is desperately amused every time to peek in the windows into the classrooms and learn that yep, Morrison Elementary is still an open-classroom school (NONE of the classrooms had walls around them, due to the school being built during the heyday of the 70s open-classroom fad. The teachers basically had lots of little carts on wheels to make imaginary walls in their spaces, and I mostly remember how we all had to be really, REALLY quiet lest everything get really, REALLY loud). I enjoy regaling him with stories of the time in the sixth grade that Stephanie started claiming to have these visions about a shadow world infiltrating our own and she started a school-wide cult and had to have brain scans.

You know, typical elementary school hijinks.

Low point of our weekend trip to Arkansas:1) Run over...something on the highway 10 miles outside of Effingham late at night on the way home. Not a human body or anything, but not an empty soda can, either.

2) Blow tire, and good.

3) Pull over.

4) Drag everything out of trunk to get to the jack and spare.

5) Commence purely academic debate in full darkness about how to change said tire. I like to believe that I'm a little more practical-minded than my beautiful partner, but even I found the lugnut/hubcap/wheel well arrangement on this fairly-new-to-us Sable to be a tad bewildering, particularly in the pitch black of night.

6) Phone Papa, former owner of the new-to-us Sable, but before can get any useful information out of him, my mother, either hysterical or just having taken a few too many sleeping pills again, faints on him, and he has to hang up.

7) Reconsider my family relationships, looking for someone level-headed, sober, and with mechanical skills. Phone Uncle Art and he tells me how to put the spare on.

8) Back in car. New alarming lights light up when we start the engine, and ominous shudderings cause us to shut back down and renogotiate the entire process.

8a) Adjourn to engine, where we look at stuff. Am filled with inspiration and use my camera flash to illuminate the engine in second-long bursts:8b) Get distracted by how prettily the hazard lights photograph----but it doesn't really matter, since neither of us know what we're doing, anyway.

9) Sigh a big sigh and phone Papa again. Must first hear tale of how many times my mother fainted and how he finally got her back to bed all snug and tucked in, but then am rewarded with the valuable piece of information that is his roadside assistance member number.

10) Call roadside assistance. Spend long time waiting for tow truck, managing girls' expectations of soon! Seeing! A TOW TRUCK!!!

11) Tow truck is all it was imagined would be. Mechanic restarts blown fuel switch, and we follow him to his creepy little repair shop.

12) Will NOT even look at the corner of the room where his cot sits, and where I may have seen some porn.

13) Will NOT look.

14)Look, and then wish I hadn't.

15) Matt buys tire, tire is installed, and we arrive at our blessed home at around 2 am.

And THAT'S why I was grouchy during office hours, students!

Well, that and your inability to come up with a representation for your horror-genre artifacts that is meaningful within its cultural context, of course. I'm sorry, but "fear of the unknown" and "fear of death" is universal, kiddos!

Lucy and I Didn't Always Agree

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a half-hour usability study for the new IUB home page. Usability studies are right up my alley--five different problems to solve using the web site (finding where the list of part-time jobs for students is located, finding a map with Woodburn Hall located on it, finding the requirements for study abroad, etc.), and My. Opinion. Matters.

Hells, yeah.

In exchange, UITS gave me a $20 Barnes & Noble gift card. I know, right? I carried it around in my pocket for days until we all had a chance to get to Barnes & Noble, and I pored over every single craft book in the store until I finally settled on .
and the Skull-a-Day book were both close contenders, and
(inspirator of the rainbow patchwork marker roll) might have won altogether if there'd been any in stock.

There are some VERY cool things in Weekend Sewing. I have laid out on my cutting mat right now the pattern for Ruby's Bloomers, but the absolute first thing I needed to sew was a baby gift for a dear friend of mine who's expecting her second daughter next month. I already have permission to hold that baby anytime I want to, and if I'm going to enjoy dressing her up and loving on her and taking pictures of her little feet and then dressing her up in a new outfit, she needs some teeny little clothes to be dressed up in.

I sort-of sewed to a pattern once before, but not really. And wow--it's harder than I thought. I chose the Lucy's Kimono pattern as the one that I would most look forward to dressing up my little baby in, and I found a dumpster-dived pale green striped button-down blouse in my stash. I got everything cut out just the way Heather Ross wanted me to, and all nicely pinned and everything-- --and then... I don't know, I kept not being able to figure out things. In step 3, for instance, the instructions asked me to attach the kimono fronts to the kimono back at the shoulder seams, with the WRONG sides together. I stared and stared and stared at that for a while, but I finally decided that it just couldn't be correct--wouldn't that put the seam on the outside of the kimono? The hand-drawn illustration of step 3 (it's picky, but hand-drawn illustrations/patterns in craft tutorials are a big pet peeve of mine) seems to have the right sides together, so that's what I went ahead and did. Kind of made my mind melt for a little while.

My biggest headache, however, came from the darn sleeves. I think this might just be my unfamiliarity with pattern sewing, but there wasn't any indication of how the sleeves might be oriented to attach to the body. Each sleeve was a sort of trapezoid, with two long, straight sides and two short angled sides--what end gets sewn to the body?

I made my most educated guess, sewed it up, and felt comfortable enough with my choice to finish the kimono. I dont' know, though...when I looked at it, it just seemed odd. Funny how my sleeves are long and skinny, and the sleeves in the book are short and wide...Crap.

After I ripped out the stupid sleeves, I didn't have enough material left from the button-down shirt to make them anew, so I cut them instead from the quilting cotton I was using as the bias fabric: Even more freakin' adorable than the first try, if I do say so myself.

So the end result would maybe be: Book Errors=2 (asking for the wrong sides together when it should be the right sides, not including the location for the side ties on the pattern piece). Human Errors=1 (sewing the sleeves on sideways. Unless sleeves are supposed to have their edges marked, and then that would be another Book Error). Anyway, only the sleeve issue was dire--everything else, even if I didn't understand it at first, I was able to figure out. And it was well worth the trouble.

It seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth for my mom friend to have to find a matching bottom for the kimono top, so I sewed the baby a pair of tiny little pants from the sleeves of the button-down blouse: I can't decide if I love them, or if they just look like two sleeves stuck together:

And then, and THEN, I found in the girls' blankie stash a little baby blanket I'd scavenged years ago, with an awesome circus print on it in green, to serve as the wrapping for the outfit.

And once that baby is born, I get to dress her in that outfit and wrap her in that blanket and hold her anytime I want. I have a promise.

Wildflowers, Interpreted

Due to a little "incident" yesterday evening (Cake aptly named this incident "When Ice Cream Turns into Tragedy"), the girls are enjoying themselves a Land Before Time glut this morning, leaving me with, ahhh----free time on my hands.

So Matt's been teaching nights for a change, so the girls and I hiked over to the Chocolate Moose for some ice cream--The Chocolate Moose, did you know, is immortalized in my favorite John Cougar Mellancamp music video:

After getting ice cream we usually walk over to Third Street Park to enjoy it. Last night there was a play practice going on in the outdoor theater, so the girls and I sat on some steps nearby to watch it. Next to the steps are a wall and a hill below it and Willow, who's been fascinated lately with jumping off of fairly high surfaces, was having me play Humpty Dumpty with her--I have to recite the poem as she acts it out. It was unfortunately quite distracting to the play people--in the distance they could apparently clearly observe a child jumping off of a high wall and lying crumpled on the ground below it for several seconds, before hopping up and doing the whole thing over and over again. There were a lot of blown lines, etc.

Sydney has the unhappy distinction of being the "little" sister, alas, and at one point I looked up just in time to see her not quite so much jump as lurch off of the same high wall, full of happy anticipation--yeah, when she lay crumpled on the ground below it, it sure as hell wasn't so I could finish the last two lines of the poem.

Anyway, the kiddo's ankle isn't sprained, I don't think, but it's sore, deserving of lots of foot baths and TV time and just generally getting carried around everywhere--not such a bad deal, when you think about it.

In other news, one of our favorite activities so far this summer is to do a wildflower walk--we walk around the neighborhood, picking wildflowers off of lawns (if they look unintended) and medians and ditches, and when we get home we try ineptly to identify them from our numerous library wildflower books and then we draw pictures of them.

I don't know what it is about wildflowers that seems to call for watercolors, but it's certainly our favorite medium:

That's me doing my darndest to paint a dandelion and a clover and a wild rose. Willow's daisy and clover are much more inspired:

I love the way she does the leaves on the daisy. It's not terribly accurate, but it's totally the way they SHOULD look, you know?

Adventures of Wormy

So the day was not even two hours old, and already two nice men of the Jehovah's Witness religion were keeping me company as I put laundry on the line. I know the day was less than two hours old because all I'd done was wake up, have a lovely cup of coffee out on the back deck while the girls puttered away next to me with some worksheets (I know--worksheets? But they have trouble getting started in the morning, and engaging them in something keeps Matt from stuffing them in front of PBS Kids), see Matt off to work, check my email, read a book about kelp and a wildflower alphabet book to the girls, start a load of dishes, and switch over the laundry.

Anyway, it was a fascinating conversation. We started off a little rocky when I was asked whether or not I was "religious" (totally a leading question, right?), but being 1) shy, 2) a teacher, and 3) a writer, if there's one thing that I know how to do, it's change the subject, and so I managed to segue that little convo into a question about the stance of Jehovah's Witnesses on Obama.

They don't vote! Fascinating. They should really work that sort of thing into voting statistics--you know, like, noting the percentage of non-voters whose religions forbids them to vote. But Jehovah's Witnesses, according to my friends, don't want to involve themselves in worldly government affairs. Government money is okay, though, because I asked about public schools, but they register as "conscientious objectors" in the Selective Service. And so I'm all, "But what about Korea, where military service is mandatory? Are there any Jehovah's Witnesses in Korea?"

Yep, and they all GO TO JAIL!

So then my visitors started talking about the Bible, and I don't know, it got a little dicey here, in my opinion. So this one guy is talking about how they retranslated the Bible "from the original" so that they can know exactly what Jesus' word is, and that this translation is the most accurate of the Bible translations, and I think that is very interesting. I'm very curious to know how the translation standards and procedures differed from other very popular Bible translations, like the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and how they choose what texts to include, etc. My friends were unable to help me out on this, which made me sad, and I have to say that I'm a little concerned about their declaration that the Bible is Jesus' word, flat out. I asked how they resolved the dilemma of multiple authorship--I was interested in hearing, you know, the religious decree or something--but we couldn't quite find a meeting place to get that question answered.

But the guy does say that Jehovah's Witnesses try to live as the first-century Christians lived, which I think is very cool. But they're still doing the Jesus' word thing, so I'm all, "What about Peter?" And there's this silence, and then the braver guy is all, "What do you mean?" And I'm all, "Peter the Apostle? The Rock? The guy in charge of spreading the religion and Jesus' message and basically founding Christianity, since Jesus died, you know, abruptly?" There was no Word then, no Gospel to consult--they hadn't been written yet. You had to ask Peter. But Jehovah's Witnesses don't seem to acknowledge Peter, or the role he played in transmitting, founding, setting the guidelines for Christianity--I'm finding that a little naive, I guess. But again, I'm sure if my witnesses knew there would be a test, they would have studied more esoteric knowledge about their religion prior to entering my backyard.

Anyway, then I was finished with my laundry, so I thanked them for a lovely conversation, we shook hands, and they scored me a couple of issues of Watchtower. I wonder if I can request, like, a historian as my new neighborhood Witness? I'm feeling a little academically unsatisfied by that conversation, although really, they were quite amiable--I imagine you learn to be a good sport when you witness in a college town. The people hanging up their laundry keep turning out to be Medieval/Classical scholars and stuff.

So then I went and found the girls--thank gawd they hadn't drowned themselves or fallen down the stairs while I was spending a half-hour getting my comparative religions geek on--and it turns out that Willow had been creating this:
I only sort of halfway admired it at the time, because I was still all "How can you not have heard of the Vulgate if you're talking about Bible translations?", but I did let Will fill my CF card with photos, so I'm getting to admire it now:
I like how it's basically all these animals that have somehow managed to trap a brachiosaurus inside a block fortress, and now they're all just gathered around staring at it and gossiping amongst themselve and saying "Holy CRAP! What are we going to do with that thing now?"

So then I got to sew a little and we read some more books outside on our He-Man bedspread and the girls ate apples and pineapples and I sewed yet some more and then Sydney showed up with a worm and asked if it could be our pet, and I said yes. Enter Wormy, Will's new soulmate:
We are only keeping Wormy until tomorrow--I'm pretty sure the only way this will work is if we switch Wormies VERY often. So--jar, holes in the lid, dirt, mulch, greenery, a little water.

I tried being all natural and put Wormy in an old applesauce jar, but this was STUPID. Wormy's house lasted through lunch, through more goofing around in the yard, through a trip to Joann's and Matt's work, but on our way into Barefoot Kids to buy sunscreen and bug spray Will was so excited to spot a bumblebee sniffing around a rose that she dropped Wormy right on the sidewalk and smashed the jar into a billion bits. Of COURSE. Then freaked out that Wormy was hurt. Then wouldn't sit on the steps like I told her to while I cleaned out the glass. Then cut her hand on the glass. Etc. etc.

Fortunately, Barefoot's proprietor, my buddy Scott, gave Will another GLASS JAR for Wormy, so, you know, yay. And Scott and I got to do the whole townie thing where a lady came in from out of town, asked for directions somewhere, and Scott and I fought about the best way to get there. I LOVE that. We're all, "So then you take a right on Walnut. Is it Walnut? It's the one that goes South. And it's one-way, but it'll turn two-way and then you take a left. And the building you're looking for, it's brand-new, blah, blah, blah."

I know, I know, you'd think the day would be almost over, but it's not. First we have to go home and watch an episode of Planet Earth (on account of I am exhausted), and then do some more laundry, and then go on a nature hike to pick wildflowers and get super-excited to see this ladybug--

--and then go home and I go out shopping (I bought 16 Kashi frozen pizzas. They were on HUGE sale) and Matt feeds the girls dinner and they con him into letting them watch Land Before Time, and NOW they're finally asleep, and I'm trying to figure out if I'm too tired to make myself a smoothie, or if I should just watch Step Brothers with Matt until I fall asleep, too.

And tomorrow we're going to garage sales, baby.

But What Does It Look Like to YOU?

So I'm grading some final papers in the study, while the girls are playing outside and Matt is working on my book proposal on the other side of the table, and I'm separating, as I go, the students' copies of their secondary sources that they've paperclipped to their final papers, when I see:
"Oh, my GAWD!"" I shriek, thrusting the offending paperclip out at Matt. "Where on Earth do you think my student found THIS? I can't BELIEVE she thought that was appropriate!"

Matt is very busy, and so he barely looks up before getting back to work, and he simply says, "It's supposed to be a dog bone, Julie."

Oh. Yeah, I can totally see that.

In other news, WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!! My final papers are graded and my final grades are submitted, and other than answering student emails complaining about said grades, my summer has BEGUN! The level of bliss that I am experiencing is quite incomprehensible.

I did SO MUCH awesome stuff today, the first day of my summer vacay. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow, but here's a sneak peekie: check out my tutorial for mending a hole in your back pocket so that your ass doesn't hang out of your jeans, over at Crafting a Green World.

FRAK!!!

My computer is messed up. Another word for this is "suck," which rhymes with the word that I say when I can't get onto the internet for more than a minute at a time for the past three days.

And also? Matt almost died last night and I saved his life with the Heimlich Maneuver.

Frakking grapes.

Photos and a real post tomorrow? And internet and ebay and foobiverse and Gosselins without Pity and Crafting a Green World and answering students' emails and PMs on Craftster?

We'll see...

Shrink Plastic Buttons You Need a Microscope to See

I've been really really REALLY wanting to get my hands on , but it's not yet my turn in the library queue, and anyway my vintage button stash is dismal (it's a dream of mine to someday go to a garage sale and find a gallon jar of vintage buttons marked at something like 50 cents...someday), but I heard that there's a shrink plastic button project somewhere in the book, and I did have an old empty container of Kroger's pumpkin chocolate chip cookies languishing in the #6 Plastics crate on the kitchen counter (yep--we have a storage container in the kitchen just for #6 plastic. That stuff is useful!), so...

I punched a bunch of one-inch circles out of #6 plastic, punched a couple of buttonholes in the center, and the girls and I got out the Sharpies and worked--

--and worked----and worked. I had a plan to make some buttons around the alphabet for my VWX Alphabet ATC Swap over at Craftster (you'll see in a moment why this is no longer part of the plan), and Sydney seemed to greatly enjoy making entirely black button after entirely black button, but Willow did this funny thing where she made faces out of the buttons, using the buttonholes as eyes:

Ahhhh, negative space.

With more forethought, I would have cut out circles of varying sizes and thereby avoided the below phenomenon in which all of our shrink plastic buttons are now nearly microscopic--But, eh. It's crafting!

What fun is forethought?

P.S. Check out my shout-out in the Weekly Craft Round-up over at The Long Thread. Woot!

P.P.S. I think it's really funny when people rename my posts when they link to them--they're all, "I'm sorry, but I am not putting the word "RAWK" on my blog!" Justifiable, I think.

Her Sister was Never This Rotten

After I set the girls up with lunch yesterday morning, I snuck off into the study for a few minutes to see if I could get another paper graded--we're deep in the midst of Project #1 in my Freshman Comp classes, and grading 44 papers containing an uninsightful application of Seger's hero myth formula to Spiderman makes me want to strangle myself every single semester.

So I grade a paper (70%--sigh), come back to see if anyone wants seconds, and find this:

Peanut butter is really hard to scrape off of the wall. Being a mom, this gets to be one of the things that I now know.

P.S. Check me out on whip up! It's one of my super-favorite blogs, and it's featuring my post from Crafting a Green World about making Valentines from comic books.

Charcoal Pudding Tastes Like Charcoal, not Pudding

So yesterday morning I drank coffee, I made peanut butter cookies with the girls, I did my cardio workout with YourselfFitness, I worked on my Valentines while the girls drew some dinosaurs for a book list we're putting together, I wrote, I fixed lunch for the girls (salad, swiss cheese, and faux bologna in a pita), I went to tell them lunch was ready, and I found them both crouched in the hallway, having scaled the linen closet shelves and defeated the child-proof cap, downing an entire bottle of store-brand children's Tylenol.

Dr. Schechter said call National Poison Control. National Poison Control said call Indiana Poison Control. Indiana Poison Control ran some numbers for me (while Willow, who tends to get a little overwrought, ran hysterically weeping from room to room, on each pass shrieking out a new lie to me about how much Tylenol she had consumed--"I only drank one and Sydney drank six!" "I drank six, too!"), and decided that even if Willow had drank the entire bottle of Tylenol, she was still at a non-toxic level, but Sydney?

Sydney and I were taking a little trip to the emergency room.

But of course, since being a stay-at-home mom means that even an emergency is filled with chores of mind-numbing suckage, I first had to call Matt to come get Willow, get both girls dressed (face washed? clean shirt? Cause I seriously might get a visit from Social Services this time), call my bestest mom friend to ask her to pick up Willow after preschool, move Willow's car seat to the other car, take down the two stuffed dinosaurs (T. Rex and pteranodon, in case you're keeping count) that I'd hidden away for the girls' birthdays and give them to them to stave off future hysterics, grab the backpack of car toys, and remind Matt no fewer than 18 times to sign the form in the office giving someone else permission to pick up Willow after school.

Compared to that, the ER was a little relaxing, frankly. If you want service, you really should walk in holding the hand of a cute little red-cheeked, bright-eyed girl in a teddy bear coat and say, "Poison Control sent us." Because you get all kinds of service then.

You get to eat charcoal pudding and drink (non-organic!) milk off and on for four hours:

You get to play with floam and magnet games and color in your sister's(!) coloring book that Momma grabbed my mistake (which said sister actually had the nerve to give me crap about this morning and I'm all, "Lady? You don't even want to start that with me"):And you even get teddy bears! Well, the first teddy bear is free. The second one, however, you must pay for in blood:

To recap, if you keep over-the-counter medicine (children's Tylenol is a crock anyway, partly because accidental overdose is so common (ahem) and I basically only kept it to give Willow a taste as a placebo whenever she gets hysterical because she feels sick (she's gets a little overwrought, remember?)), it's a good idea to make a mental/physical note whenever you dispense it of how much is left in the bottle--that's important to know. It's also a good idea to always know a ballpark number of how much your kid weighs.

If your kid is an idiot and drinks your Tylenol, Poison Control needs those numbers, as well as how much is left undrunk (I used a measuring cup), to do their math. If they send you to the emergency room, you'll have to wait there for four hours, guaranteed, before they can do the blood-draw, since that's apparently the length of time it takes for Tylenol to peak in the bloodstream. You'll also have to feed your kid chocolate pudding spiked with charcoal and non-organic milk. They warned me that kids sometimes vomit up the charcoal, but Syd has a stomach of iron.

So the arbitrary number of Tylenol toxicity in the bloodstream is 100. Syd was a 30, so we got to go home (I tell this to Matt, and he's all, "I wonder what the number for normal is?" I'm all, "Well, dear, since it's a measure of how much Tylenol is in your bloodstream, I'm thinking that the number for normal is, you know, ZERO.") In retrospect, I imagine he meant what is the number for one normal dose, and that is 7.

But of course, I don't only have the sucky chores of a stay-at-home mom to do--hanging out in the ER for five hours, organizing pre-school pick-ups--but also the sucky chores of a working woman, so Syd and I got home just in time for me to upload a couple of handouts to my class Web site, print out some sign-up sheets, change my shirt and brush my teeth, call my mom friend and organize a Willow transer (in a Village Pantry parking lot, on the way to the other kid's violin lesson), and get back in the car and over to my class so that one kid can come up to me crying because she accidentally erased the final version of her paper and only has the rough draft to hand in, and one kid can ask if he can handwrite his Works Cited page because he forgot to do it before, and one kid can ask, "Are we getting out early today?" and then huff grumpily back to his seat when I say, "Um...no."

Because if you want to annoy your instructor, you should make sure she's just spent five hours in the emergency room with her small child, and then you should ask her some whiny question trying to get out of learning and be mad when she informs you that no, come hell or high water, there will be learning done tonight.

At least I got that one thing accomplished.

Wasting Away

I'm siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!!! (insert lots of whining, kvetching, moaning, and just general unpleasantness of personality here)

I swear to y'all, I have the WORST immune system! I started feeling unwell a couple of hours after Syd did--six hours after that, she's jumping up and down on the bed, and today, I'm still fainting while attempting to microwave the girls a Hot Pocket (guess whose husband did the grocery shopping this week?).

And so why am I sitting here, in my break between evening classes, alternately typing and laying my cheek on the cool, cool surface of my desk (likely teeming with germs), and not laying in my near-permanent at this point fetal position on the bed at home and trying to dream my way to my happy place?

Because I'm just that good of a teacher, my friends.

Is my halo showing?

If You Think I Look Bad, You Should See the Bananas

Choosing to carry several bunches of bananas in my arms rather than hold onto the railing this morning, I fell down half a flight of stairs into my basement. Wow, that hurt. After moaning and writhing for a while on the cool concrete floor, I rallied long enough to make it back up the stairs, through the hallway, and into the girls' bed, where I called Matt on the cell and panted something like, "Killed myself. Come home."

It really didn't take him that long to get back here.

We ascertained that nothing is broken except possibly for my coccyx (which could be), but I am currently occupying what is commonly known as "a world of hurt." It involves lots of ibuprofin, lots of moaning, as little movement as possible, and quite a bit of parenting using mindless forms of entertainment.

Hello, coloring pages. Hello, Netflix.

I have found myself completely unable to sacrifice my Netflix subscription solely because of their "Watch Instant" feature. It's brilliant--click a couple of clicks, and you're streaming a movie, or a documentary, or an obscure TV show from the 1980s. This morning, when I was more in the whimpering and writhing in pain stage, the girls watched a lot of episodes of Caillou, but this afternoon we all watched SEVERAL episodes of PBS's Nature--one on The San Diego Zoo, one on Dogs, and bizarrely, I was so out of it that I can't even think of the third. Anyway, Watch Instant rules.

And even though I think that in general, coloring pages are not only NOT art, but also detrimental to the natural development of children's art, they're so handy in a pinch that I do keep myself well-stocked for emergencies. I have a lot of these coloring pages from Sprout, for instance--nothing with a character, but a lot of number pages and letter-sound illustrations and sea creatures and dinosaurs, etc., so later this afternoon when I was sick of nature documentaries but not feeling capable of actually thinking through an interaction with my children, I whipped them on out. And fortunately, I think I so far utilize them rarely enough that my girls still have their own agendas with them. Syd mostly "writes":
(she's asking me to spell "Dadda" for her, and every letter I say gets another little circle), and although Will does like to color the pictures, she's really into cutting these days:
Cutting is kind of a hard skill for a lefty to master, but she's plugging away.

I also got to cancel my classes tonight (woo!), and so lay in bed for another few hours watching Netflix movies while Matt cooked dinner (um, pizza and French fries?), goofed around with the girls, bathed them, and read them to sleep.

Will the coccyx be better tomorrow? We'll see.

Well, At Least It's Over Now

At least I can say that I've done it now: I've sold at a craft show in the rain. A deluge, really. I mentioned before, right, that I don't have a tent? My usual practice in case of rain is to buy one of the crap E-Z Up lite tents from Sam's the night before the big event and then return it afterwards on account of it sucks, but it's never actually come out and rained before when I've gone to all that trouble, so I won't tell you whose husband talked her out of doing the same thing yesterday even though there was a 40% chance of rain today, but I will tell you that that husband sucked, because it totally rained. A lot.

I thought I had it made, anyway, because I got the show organizer to let me set up next to my usual spot, in a spot always left empty because it contains a big tree. So I set up under the big tree, and thought that if I kept everything inside the drip line, I'd be so happy and dry. Inside the drip line, people. That sounds like a good plan, right? And at first, when it was just sprinkling, it totally worked. And then, when it was raining a little harder, it kind of worked. But then, when it was pouring and thundering and lightening right over my head and I'm soaked to the skin and the stand holding the pillowcase dresses falls over and the plate holding the cut-out buttons is full of water to the brim, it really didn't work all that well at all.

Really, not much of my stuff got wet because it rained mostly during set-up, but my infrastructure got soaked, which made everything damp anyway, and I got soaked, which made me grumpy, and I couldn't make my set-up look anything like it wasn't all bedraggled and sad after a thunderstorm, and then hardly anybody even came out to the farmer's market, anyway, on account of it was still all gross and humid and probably going to rain again. But now I can say that I've sold at a craft fair in the rain. That makes up for not actually breaking even, right?