Two Very Different Schools of Thought

So Matt says that he fixed my computer, but since he also said that three days ago after turning it off and back on again, and then again after rebooting the wi-fi router, and then again after running an anti-virus program, and then again after reinstalling Windows (causing me to have to reinstall all my programs), and then again after rebooting Windows to a previous installation, I'm trying to blog really, really quickly.

Which is ridiculous, since I have a LOT to say.

There was an interesting juxtaposition of activities this week--on the one hand, the spring Parents' Evening at Will's Montessori preschool, and on the other hand, a forum for parents of prospective kindergarteners at our local public elementary school.

I'll do Montessori first, because I think there are going to be some friends who are going to be unhappy with what I say about the public school, so I'll let you get your happy vibes on before that.

So you probably know by now that Montessori classrooms do not welcome parents in on a drop-in basis--the classroom is the child's space, with important work for the child to do, and parents basically just get in the way of all the happy little elf-work. But one night a semester, Will's school has a shortened session to which parents are invited.

This is the animal stamping work. You use the animal stamps to stamp the appropriate number of times under each number--this is one of the first works that the three-year-olds are taught, which is why there are boxes to show you how many goes where. Children are always welcome, however, to do any work that they've been taught whenever they want, and repetition of easier works is something that kids find comforting, and that gives them a sense of how far they've progressed, and helps them internalize certain concepts, sort of like muscle memory for the mind. Will still does this animal stamping work about once a week.
This is a work in which you scoop different objects out of the fishbowl, sort them into separate porcelain bowls, then dump them back in the bowl and sponge up the water. It's a sorting work and a motor skills work to practice the spoon grip.
One of the things that I've found really interesting this year is that in the fall semester Parents' Night, Willow was almost entirely interested in the works that practiced pretty abstract and sometimes complicated mental skills--arithmetic, literacy, a lot of handwriting practice, some geography, calendars, stuff like that. But lately she's been almost entirely interested in the motor skills works--dipping, gripping, squeezing stuff. I've actually noticed this at home, too, in that she's far less interested in thing like mazes and math worksheets and dinosaur identification and the art that she usually loves, and she's been happiest just running around and jumping and digging and messing stuff up and helping me do housework. It's a different stage of development that she's in at the moment, I guess, and I'm very pleased that her school also supports this type of development and allows her to practice satisfying works that challenge her motor skills as well as her academic skills.

In this work you use the tool to move the little balls from the bowl to the platter and then back again. It's terrific for the scissors grip, which lefties often find a lot more challenging to learn, only I've just noticed that my own little lefty is using her right hand here. Sigh.

One of my other many favorite things about the classroom environment is that there are no pictures of kittens hanging from tree limbs or motivational posters (have you seen the site where you can make your own de-motivational posters? Rawk), but there are, instead, hanging quilts on the walls and African drums and these really lovely Japanese prints:This one is a partner work. One child wears the blindfold, and the other child hands her two swatches of cloth--velvet, burlap, cotton, etc. The blindfolded child says if they're the same or different. I think that older children might do an ordering work with this, as well--Montessori young child work is very big on teaching them to order gradations of things, like sounds from highest pitch to lowest, textures from roughest to smoothest, colors from darkest tone to lightest tone. I don't remember the exact philosophy, but it's something about heightened sensory development and deep concentration, or something: This is another sorting work, and I think might be another three-year-old work, as well. It also involves categorization, since you put the insects together, and the plants together, and animals together. Everything you need for a particular work is all together on a little child-sized tray, remember, and you can get it off the shelf and put it back as you like. There are purposefully not enough tables in the room for every single child to do a table work, however, and purposefully not enough floor space for every child to do a floor work, either, because living in a community involves recognizing that the rights of other people are as important as yours and that prior involvement takes precedence. The new thing in the middle group is that you get your first work plan. It helps give the child a well-rounded experience by asking them to, at first, complete a small number of activities in various curriculum categories chosen by themselves and by the teacher. It lets a teacher unobtrusively set a child extra time with a skill with which they might be struggling, and lets children learn goal-setting and the feeling of accomplishment. Older children get increasingly more detailed work plans and are increasingly more in charge of creating and fulfilling them, until in just a couple of years a child's work plan becomes not just a goal chart, but a daily, often hourly, sometimes more frequently-updated record of exactly what that child is doing and what they are learning and have learned at any given time--this, by the way, is a far more complete and accurate record than standardized testing, although our Montessori still participates in some standardized testing, mostly so that the children are comfortable with it after they've left the program.Practical life is also big fun. The girls both have their own brooms and dustpans and spray bottles at home, but sweeping the classroom is still awesome, apparently. Although after Will swept some dirt into the dustpan, she forgot a step and just hung the dustpan up without emptying it, spilling all the dirt right back onto the floor. Oh, well--it's one way to ensure that 30 kids all have some dust to sweep up.You can pet the class gerbils whenever you want and feed them, too, if you see that they need it, but you must ask a teacher to supervise you.For the spring Parents' Night, the children do Speaker's Rug, which is something they do weekly. A small square of carpet is passed around the circle, and when it comes to you, you may stand on the carpet and say something, or you may pass it. Will is the only kid who ALWAYS passes, because she's very uncomfortable with situations in which she isn't sure exactly what the social script is, but she sits respectfully and listens to the other children speak, and she sees that all the other kids do, too, and Speaker's Rug happens every single week like clockwork so it's something that's inevitably going to become familiar and comfortable enough that one day she WILL feel the confidence to get up and speak to her schoolmates.

I love Willow's school. And I hope that will help you see why, exactly, I hated hated HATED the forum at our local elementary school. Mind you, it's supposed to be a good school, and I've thought about that forum, and I'm thinking that (hoping that) perhaps it was just the presentation that went really wrong. Perhaps the teachers and principal COULD have said some things that I would have really liked.

Only they didn't.

What they did do...they went on and on and on about the bus schedule, randomly, in my opinion, since I'm only a PROSPECTIVE parent, and I don't yet give a flip about the bus except to know that there is one and they haven't lost a kid yet. They briefly went over the daily schedule, but it was like "We walk the circle at 8:45, then at 9:00 we have open choice, then we meet in the circle, then we go to an activity, then recess, then lunch, then nap, then reading, then science, then home." Okay...

My friend Noel asked if the kindergarteners ever interacted with the older children (hoping that they DID, you know), and all the kindergarten teachers fell all over each other reassuring all the parents that they watched their kids so closely and they only had recess and lunch with older children but there were assigned seats at lunch and five teachers at recess, etc. etc.

I asked what the teaching philosophy was regarding media exposure, particularly computer and videos, and how did that translate into classroom practice, and one (older) teacher apologized before she said that she didn't approve of five-year-olds using the computer, and then when I assured her that I perfectly agreed, some other teacher jumped in to say that every teacher's classroom was different and that SHE taught her children to properly utilize the computer right from the beginning.

One teacher made a joke that a five-year-old's attention span is about five minutes long.

Another teacher made a joke that when a parent complained to her about all-day kindergarten, she said to that parent, "Well, you can see your kid at night."

You see what I'm getting at here? A lot of this stuff is just normal for teachers to think--hell, the things I think about my students quite often is not printable in a family blog--but very little of this is what, as a prospective parent, I needed to here about the program. I needed to hear what their teaching philosophies are, what their views are on student learning styles and ranges of development, how they handle discipline and teach the kids to handle conflict, how the children are encouraged to socialize and form a community, etc.

Except that then they cut off the presentation portion so that people could fill out forms. I did manage to commandeer one last teacher to ask one last question (No, there's no foreign language curriculum, but sometimes they have a club), but then I admit that I ditched before the school tour. I used to go there a lot for a preschool playgroup, so I've seen the place.

But seriously, it could have just been a bad presentation for a good school. For instance, one of the teachers talked about how at first, the kindergarteners would spend most of their time learning that they had to wait their turn and let 20 kids go ahead of them and that they had to sit quietly and not touch each other. I was telling Matt that this pissed me off, that I did NOT think it necessary that a five-year-old have to learn these particular lessons, but Matt was all, "Of course you do. They do that same stuff at Montessori, only they tell you that it teaches community-building and respect for all people and manners. It just sounds like junk here because they're doing that stuff just to keep order, but it's still the same stuff."

And there was also this really long speech in which this one teacher talked on and on and ON about how we were all going to be so mad at her for the first couple of weeks because she would not let "her kids" leave her from the front of the school at the end of the day until they'd given her a high five and she'd made eye contact with us, because they were "her kids" and she needed to say goodbye to them and we'd just have to wait. I actually replayed this speech in my head for her, something like, "I take my role in loco parentis very seriously. My students must learn that they cannot leave my side without my permission, even to go to another trusted adult. I teach them that they must high-five me before they go to you because this keeps them from running off without supervision and because it gives me time to see you and know that they are going to an appropriate caregiver." See? That sounds way better. And if you could refer to her as your "student" and not your "kid," I'd like that, too, thanks.

I wasn't disappointed in the school, though, really, because I clearly remember the time I've spent in public schools as a student and as a teacher, and so it was never my intent to enroll my girls--when we can no longer afford Montessori, I will joyfully transition the girls to homeschooling--but I was happy that Matt, who's more ambivalent about homeschooling and who has pleasant memories of public school, got to go to this meeting. It's not quite what he remembers, I think, and he knows that we can do better without it.

I'm lying, though, because really I am disappointed. Most people can't afford the money for a fancy-pants private school or the time for full-on homeschooling, and I don't like to think about how it would have felt to have gone to that meeting and come away thinking as negatively about it as I do now, but know that my kids were going to go there, anyway.

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...

Digitally Crafty

In keeping with my personal theme of family-wide collaboration (and my personal goal of our girlies someday having two independently-employed stay-at-home parents), I've been thinking for quite a long while of ways to incorporate my Matt into some of my crafty work. I learned right away, at about 8 pm on the eve of my very first big craft show, that Matt, although full of big promises--"Sure, I'll help out!"--is completely mentally/emotionally unsuited for actual crafting, or preparing displays, or even helping to set up or boothsit at actual craft fairs, although I make him do those last two things anyway because he has muscles and a girl's gotta browse (and pee).

And while a ton of other ideas that I have (I always have a ton of ideas of varying degrees of impracticality), such as tutorial zines or patterns, could incorporate Matt, those aren't really creative uses for him, more just utilizing his graphic designer expertise in Adobe Illustrator CS4.

There are ways to do craft digitally, though. Not only are there some graphic designers who do handcraft, like the lastest EtsyBlogger featured blogger--

--but handcraft is one area that really appreciates good design, and I've noticed, especially lately, a lot of digital design being sold in the supply market. Shabby Princess, for example, sells (and gives away), these really elaborate digital scrapbooking kits with papers and fonts and realistic-looking embellishments and journal tags and stuff, all digital, and there are a lot of shops on etsy that have been selling digital collage sheets for printing and incorporating into physical craft work.

And that explains why Matt's working right now on a comic book-themed digital scrapbooking kit for my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

On account of we're still big dorks.

In other news, awesome Matt went out to run some errands on Friday night and came home with chocolate and . You might remember that I'm a big fan of the first books (though I'd rather just forget that the last book even happened; as far as I'm concerned, she wrote The Host instead, not along with), and I was really eager to see the movie, despite the mixed reviews.

My opinion? A mixed review.

Some of the negatives, mind you, are hard to remedy and are just really part of the product--for instance, I think it's a very rare child who can act, and therefore I accept the fact that unless a film is extremely carefully written and directed or unless an extremely gifted child actor is chosen, the young actor will just not be that great. And that's something you just have to accept. So it really didn't bother me that the kid who played Edward Cullen, or the kids who played all their friends, had pretty spotty performances. Seriously, Daniel Radcliffe can't do EVERY acting role available to young men, now can he?

I did think that the role for Bella was written in such a way that the actress could and did perform it well. Bella's supposed to be a loner at first, cautious at first, a little wary of showing emotion at first--this mostly requires that the actress look solemn and non-reactive, and she nailed it.

The various reveals of the various plot points were also a little spotty, as if the writer and director couldn't decide if they wanted you to have read the book first and therefore know what's going to happen or not. Again, part of the film-from-book product.

Okay, but the point is that I thought the movie was both terrible AND awesome. The cinematography was terrific--evocative of the mood of the film, and that and just everything else about the film was just so modern-day gothic that it was really, really gluttonously fun. So maybe you didn't have to take the GRE Literature and thus didn't read The Monk or the The Mysteries of Udolpho or any of that stuff, but as a former literary scholar I just ate it up! The music fit, the forest scenes REALLY fit, and hell, even the melodramatic acting really fit in with the overall theme.

And that's why every time Matt was groaning in disgust during this whole film, I was going "SQUEAAAL!"

Because I'm smarter than him.

My Pumpkinbear Etsy Shop is Presentable Again!

What with, you know, parenting and teaching freshman comp and cooking food and starting seeds and sewing presents for little-kid birthday parties and cleaning and writing my book proposal and making patterns for my book proposal and creating some Artist Trading Cards for my Craftster ATC WXY swap and blah blah blah, my pumpkinbear etsy shop was growing sadly neglected, and it was starting to make me feel antsy.

So off and on this weekend, in between the sewing and seed starting and stuff, I found some time to update. It didn't help that the weather turned (AGAIN!) and so all my photos are weirdly lit, but perfect lighting or not, they're up, and that's better than perfect lighting.

The fun thing is that I managed to update with a lot of really different stuff, some of which I've been sitting on for too long due to just doing other stuff. So I've got some vintage crafting stuff, like this crazy-awesome lap loom, with all its parts AND an instruction book, that I happened upon fortuitously one day:

Matt made his first digital collage sheet for me, just a simple one-inch set of the international breastfeeding symbol images that we use to make pinbacks, so that other crafty people with button machines can make their own fundraisers for their own natural birthing advocacy organizations: I sold off all my other comic book pinbacks and doily pinbacks, so I FINALLY relisted a set of each: I have to make some more of the black doily pinbacks before I can relist those, but I'm still on this random rainbow kick, and so I'm also absurdly stoked by my rainbow doily pinbacks.

And finally, now that I've gotten my T-shirt smock pattern all worked out to my satisfaction I'm thinking of changing it into a T-shirt apron for my book proposal (more gender neutral, don't you think maybe?), which pattern I'd also need to work out (pushing the proposal mailing back just a few more days, squidge squidge), but anyway, now that it's all worked out and happy I can enjoy sewing up some crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt dresses out of my crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt stash:

Captain America--such a nice guy. Too bad about Bucky.

P.S. Check out my expose on a big company that ripped off an indie crafter over at Crafting a Green World.

Because Everyone Needs a Dinosaur Dress

I've been working out this new pattern idea for making dresses/tops out T-shirts, sort of like the pillowcase dresses I make. Of course, figuring out a new pattern requires making up that pattern several times, and hence:

Velociraptor Dress

I think I'm actually liking this idea a lot more than the pillowcase dresses, because, duh, it's way more fangeek. It's tricky with the bias straps, though, because they ought to be all mitchy-matchy, but I hate to buy new fabric.

Fortunately, Mr. Velociraptor also has some pale green accents to complement the pale green fabric I used here:I'm making this pattern to include in my book proposal, but I'll also likely have a few of these dresses up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop this weekend after I'm satisfied with the way it's working, because it's a good way to use up my stash of awesome T-shirts.

Don't worry, though--I made the girl put on pants before I sent her to school:

Good Game Morning

With the rainy weather, the children didn't take to being booted outside first thing in the morning the way we'd been doing it earlier this week, so it was yet another indoor morning for us.


Prescription? Games, games, games.


I'm not at all into games--board games, card games, sports, about the only thing I will do is sit down for a good session of D&D if you've got a rockin' DungeonMaster--so the benefit when I do chill out with the girls and play a bunch of games with them is that, not only am I bored to tears inside my head, but I also get to feel like a REALLY good mother, you know, sacrificing my mental capacity and emotional well-being for my girls.


The girls are especially fond of Uncle Wiggily, a Goodwill score of a few months ago. Admittedly, it's a terrific game for their age range--you can use it to reinforce counting, number identification, basic arithmetic, as well as the usual turn-taking and sportsmanship and stuff:
When Sydney gets bored and wanders off to pretend that the toy dinosaurs are having conversations with each other, I liven the game up a little (and make it go a LOT faster) by playing Abacus Uncle Wiggily.

Do you guys have an abacus? They rock. Will can do all kind of crazy math using an abacus, and that's just the basic stuff that I know to teach her--if you really know, you can do all kinds of CRAZY stuff with an abacus.

Anyway, in Abacus Uncle Wiggily, you pull TWO cards (maybe even three, if you're brave) and add them together using the abacus: You get to hop forward your answer, of course. But if you're wrong...well, let's just say the consequences are dire.

After Uncle Wiggily, we played this ocean life card game that I bought the girls for Christmas. I don't know how you actually play, but sometimes we play a game using the front sides of the cards as flashcards--

And sometimes we use the trivia questions on the back. Okay, there is a game I do like: I LIKE trivia.

So a kid picks a card and brings it to me, and there are various permutations of which one or how many of the trivia questions on the back that I ask. If she answers the question(s) correctly, she adds the card to her collection. If she answers incorrectly, I add the card to my collection.

Because I was such a good mom, I gave myself permission to serve frozen pizza for lunch. With frozen spinach on top, though, so it's almost like a healthy lunch.

Sort of.

Meet My New Micron Pen Roll

Isn't it fabulous?Sydney put the colors in order for me, so you know they're in perfect logical order and aesthetically pleasing, to boot:Again, like my marker roll, this one is loosely based on the colored pencil roll in . I have a couple hundred other things I'm going to try out from that book, too. And now, a fancy shot:In other news--you guys, I cannot get the City Museum out of my head! How often do you start the day taking the girls to yet another hands-on museum and end up doing the funnest thing you've ever done in your entire life? Oh, and I was so sore yesterday that I could barely move.

So Matt and I were doing some research on the City Museum and the story behind it is also really interesting. Bob Cassilly is the artist/"serial entrepreneur" who's behind it, who also, probably not coincidentally, created our other favorite thing in St. Louis, Turtle Park. Anyway, he and his former wife bought the old St. Louis Shoe Factory for 69 cents a square foot and created the City Museum in it. Matt tells me that originally, it was a non-profit, and the wife was president of the board. Later, however, Cassilly insisted on buying the building back from the board to make it a for-profit enterprise, and his wife was forced out of the business and they divorced and all kinds of scandal.

You know, though, this might be a little Green Party of me, but I think the idea of a for-profit museum, as long as it doesn't go all McDonald's/Disney World, is fine. Cassilly is clearly, after seeing the City Museum, a creative genius, and not only might a board of directors stifle some of his artistic decisions ("You want to stick an old plane where?!!! And let people climb on it?!!!"), but the museum seems to have an ethical system that's both eco-friendly and local, it's not crazy expensive to visit (although it is sort of non-crazy expensive), and hell, brilliant artists deserve to make good money.

Check out this great article on Terrain about the City Museum--Through the Dragon's Mouth. I found it really insightful, both in the philosophies behind the museum that the author uncovered and in her observations about how adults and children interact there. I wonder if I'm so drawn to the place because it's perhaps the first public place I've visited that seems to share my own guiding beliefs.
Oh my gawd, y'all--the City Museum is my church!

Citified (and Sore)

As much as we love the St. Louis Science Center and the St. Louis Zoo (and their free-ness), I felt like doing something different during our day in St. Louis yesterday, a day that we usually spend every time we come home from visiting my folks in Arkansas, on account of St. Louis is so awesome.

At 12 bucks a person (excluding the baby), the City Museum was a pricey adventure, but oh my freakin' gawd, that place is better than Disney World for a recycling crafter and her two climbing monkeys!

Everything in the place is constructed primarily from stuff found within the city--steel pieces making up climbing structures, a couple of abandoned airplanes mounted way up high that you can climb all around, cranes and slides and big springs and even old shells and printing blocks and glass bottles making up mosaics on all the inside walls:
But most of what you do in the City Museum is climb:There are just all these cool steel pieces welded together to make gangways and ladders and tunnels and bridges and slides and just any awesome thing you can think of. And it's real, you know? I mean, you're not going to fall to your death or anything, but it's not all molded plastic and hand sanitizer, either. Syd busted her lip falling off a rope swing, and I ripped the pocket off my pants scrambling through a tunnel made of a big steel spring. You pick yourself up, nurse a little if you're two, then run off to do something else: There's also the same element of perceived danger that you'd get at an amusement park, but much more DIY: pretty much every single thing in that place challenged either my claustrophobia or Matt's fear of heights. Good to have a two-parent household, then, because Matt took this photo of me and Will--he was already on the second story himself:Notice here that even though Sydney is perfectly capable of doing this herself, I'm having to pack her across this bridge on my back while she squeezes my trachea and makes me feel a little light-headed: She liked the huge ball pit better:And that's just the outdoor jungle gym--there's also a huge indoor jungle gym that connects to it, a skate park area for running up and down and sliding and rolling on (who would have thought a skate park would be so much fun without a skateboard?), a circus area complete with circus classes, a huge DIY art area (that we didn't even visit, I was THAT revved up about climbing stuff), displays of artifacts found during archeological digs in St. Louis (lots of green glass bottles and awesome big marbles), a small shoelace factory (the girls and I are sporting new shoelaces today), a huge artificial caving system (oh-my-god-it's-so-small-and-dark-in-this-tunnel-I-think-I'm-going-to-die!), a gift shop featuring crafting stuff and local artists who create with recycled materials (meaning that I basically died in that caving system and found myself in heaven), and other huge climbing areas centered around eco-systems like the arctic, a swamp, and a big tree in a forest.

I think there was some other stuff that we missed.

I'M BAAAA-AAAACK!

I'm back, I'm here, I'm madly recording grades and alphabetizing papers and planning lessons and unpacking and wondering what's for dinner and replying to emails and scheduling cloth diapering classes and picking my A Fair of the Arts booth site and downloading photos and petting the cat and writing my book proposal and crafting for Luna Fest and washing dishes and...

...and maybe sitting down in a minute with a Shiner and some Netflix.

Tomorrow, I'm going to show you the most awesomest thing that we did today. You will not freakin' believe it.

It's that awesome.

One CAN Have Enough Stickers

Only a child's grandmother would buy her this ridiculous amount of stickers:

Add to that an unlimited number of Netflix-ed Land Before Time videos, a storytime at a different Ft. Smith public library branch every day, and a pizza supper with the cousins, and you have yourself QUITE the Spring Break.

Four the four-and-under set, at least...

P.S. Check out my ode to sketchbooks on Crafting a Green World and my shrinking #6 plastic tutorial over at Eco Child's Play.

The Rainbow Cake Bandwagon

In my family's Arkansas kitchen, with its big dishwasher and pantry chock-full of things we don't have at home and a 60-year collection of Tupperware and butter tubs and plastic bowls and such, the girls and I have been indulging in a wider variety of kitchen crafts than we usually do on a daily basis.

No surprise, then, that we jumped on the rainbow cake bandwagon.

I've seen rainbow cake mentioned in several blogs, most recently at Craft Magazine (my Matt has an unsavory name, of sexual connotation, for one blog posting an item, which is then picked up by another blog and posted, which is then picked up by another blog...), but our version, of course, changes some basic and crucial rules and thus doesn't end up looking like the other pictures on the other blogs. It's pretty much another shark cupcake incident.

So for instructions for a perfect-looking cake, try elsewhere.

The basic concept behind a rainbow cake is to divide a cake batter, independently color each scoop or so a different color----and then dump each scoop of cake batter into the cake pan smack on top of the scoop that came before it without stirring or mixing it up AT ALL: And then you end up with rainbow-y goodness ready to bake: My mistake, in rummaging through my family's kitchen, was that I used a white angel food cake mix, which I was able to find in a cupboard, but not an angel food cake pan, because I wasn't able to find one, although I'm sure of its existence somewhere in this house...somewhere.

Mind you, I've never made nor seen made angel food cake before, so I'm reading the back of the box and I'm all, "Hmm, no eggs? I accept that. But balance the cake upside down on a glass bottle? That's weird, and I can't do that with these cake pans, anyway," and therefore my rainbow cake layers, instead of being all light and fluffy and wide and all, are instead dense and narrow and small: But is the cake still delicious?

Why yes, yes it is.

P.S. Interested in more messy cooking with kids? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Can Tell We're Back in Arkansas

Within 24 hours of re-entering the state, we were at Wal-mart (yes, they have organic milk, no, they do not have veggie chili mix).

Here, the trees are in boisterous bloom: As we walked into storytime at the public library this morning, my girls were greeted by the SAME little old lady who was the little old lady who held storytimes when I was their age. I adored her then, and adore her now--she remembered my children's names after I introduced her, held the children rapt with a book about a duck who tried, to no avail, to avoid a spanking (she's a little old-school), sat with Sydney on her lap while a group of daycare children sang a St. Patrick's Day song for the local news (5 at 5!), and took my hand as we walked over to the crafts area so that she could ask all about my life ("Why, I'm a teacher, Ms. Louise, and I have a library science degree").

Ah, homecomings.

Matt, who drove us down here for the week but then went back to Indy to work (How I am going to survive here without him, I do not know), did not have the pleasure, thusly, of meeting Ms. Louise, but he did get to hear me blather on all about her on the phone, and all about the horrible papers I'm grading and what exactly are my students doing all class while I'm teaching the material, oh and by the way how was the drive back.

He also, because he thinks of me even when I'm not around, sent me a link to this awesome artist who embroiders female merit badges.

They are awesome.

While I never earned the Applied Mascara or even the Pantyhose badges, really, I am all about the Fertility badges. Not only do I get the ones for the Pill and Pregnancy Scare and Inserting a Tampon, but I also get nicer ones like Bride, Pregnancy-- --and Breastfeeding: But now, of course, I totally want to add to the list. How about Tandem Breastfeeding? Working with Baby in Lap?

Hosting Child's Birthday Party? Taking Child to Emergency Room? Finding the Perfect Sports Bra?

Telling Former Teachers that You're Now a Teacher Yourself?

We all deserve an entire vest full of these.

I Want to Eat My Marker Roll

Because it looks so yummy.

I first saw the gorgeous patchwork colored pencil rolls in back around Christmas time, I think...

How long it can take something to stew in one's head before it comes to fruition: This doesn't follow the book's instructions step-by-step, but back when I read it I studied it until I figured out how the most striking construction elements worked, and so I imagine that my own marker roll has some very close similarities.

In particular, I copied the idea of the matching color patchwork-- --and the up-and-down, back-and-forth quilting: I like this, in particular, a LOT better than the other ways I've seen discussed of constructing crayon rolls, which is to sew up only to the edge of the pocket and then backstitch to hold the stitch, and then move over to the next place the pocket needs to be sewn and sew up to the edge there, etc. When I made my own crayon rolls with that method, I was bored by the constant stop and start, and I disliked the look of the obvious backstitch.

This quilting method is quicker and cleaner looking.

I figured out the width of each pocket by measuring the length it took for a fabric tape measure to go from the tabletop, over the marker, and then back to the tabletop, adding a half-inch seam allowance. I measured the length of each piece as twice the length of my marker, then folded the whole thing up at the bottom to form the pocket, leaving space between the top of the marker and the top edge of the marker roll.

The marker roll's only flaw, as it pertains to my personal method of crafting, is that it requires some pretty specific color choices. Crafting primarily with recycled materials, I'm very used to working with what I already have or can cheaply obtain second-hand or from the recycling center. I'm NOT used to buying new fabric, and frankly, I was a little uncomfortable with it--consumerism isn't really the goal of my work, you know, although maybe you wouldn't know it if you saw all this fabric I bought just for these rolls:
I am going to look for some cotton button-down shirts at Goodwill tomorrow (50%-off storewide sale!) to use for this type of sewing, but I did make my peace with the new purchases a little by choosing that my outside fabric for these rolls be recycled blue jean denim. Makes it extra sturdy, I think.

Next up--a Micron pen roll, just for me!