Saturday, May 23, 2009

Crafty Garden Sprouts

I'm a total novice gardener, but I love my teen-tiny, baby sprout-y crafty garden:

Orange Tomato (for eating)
Don't you dig my non-lead vinyl blind plant markers?
Catnip (for the cat)
Birdhouse Gourd (for birdhouses)

Spearmint (for soap)
Melon (for eating) Speckled Cranberry Bean (also for eating)
Sunflower (for pretty, and also a support for the beans)
Asparagus (for yum)
And finally, some muscle helping out (for a change)
Matt loathes gardening (he has bad knees, and longs for one of those lawns you see on the toxic weed-killer commercials), so it was quite sweet that he actually helped out for a few hours today, complete with many fervent and stoutly-defended (and completely ignorant) opinions about how best to do things.


No, dear, the mulch works best if it's not actually on top of the plant itself.


Um, and yes, sweetie, you do need to take the sprout out of its plastic pot before you plant it into the ground.


Next thing you know, I'm going to turn around and find him also engaged in the children's favorite garden activity when they think I'm not looking, which is to dig up our seeds to see if they've sprouted yet. It makes me kind of want to do it, too, which is NOT helpful


Did I mention that I'm a novice gardener?

Friday, May 22, 2009

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.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Dinosaur Summer

We love dinosaurs around here, did you know? My kiddos' obsession colors every aspect of our days together, from the big, such as the little kid's AWESOME picture of a dinosaur that she drew yesterday--


--to the small: see the dinos on the big kid's jammies?

We've got some awesome dino-lovin' activities planned for this summer. We'll be practically in the front row for the Walking With Dinosaurs Live show when it comes near us in July (we're having to forgo our traditional huge summer birthday bash to afford the tickets, which are OUTRAGEOUS, but it's going to be worth the budget re-allocation, I know), and do not worry, I've already mapped out the locations of the dinosaur museums that we can visit on our June trip to Wisconsin--the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, and the Field Museum in Chicago, likely. Wisconsin is light on dinosaur museums because it doesn't have a fossil history because dinosaurs never lived there because it was covered in water during prehistoric times; this is what you get to learn when your children are obsessed with dinosaurs.

We'll also have the time and the nice weather to do some other dino activities that require more time than the big kid's three-hour daily preschool would allow (three hours doesn't seem that long while I'm living it, but I have to plan my whole damn day around it!). Whenever we can wrangle my partner (I'm begging him to ask for flex-time at work this summer. I really want him to work four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, and since he's a designer, he actually could use the extra time at work in the evenings, no phone calls, no visitors to his cubby, to focus on his designs), we're going to make measurements on the basketball court over at our neighborhood park and then draw life-size dinosaurs in chalk (this Smithsonian handbook on dinosaurs is our most precious family resource!), and I also want to score a load of helium balloons on some calm day and use them to measure out dinosaur heights in the park--ooh, I'll also need a lot of string.

We go creek-stomping around here a lot, and the kids enjoy searching for geodes and crinoid fossils (the big kid claims that she is "the best fossil hunter out of all my friends," and I have to say that it's probably true), so depending on how interested they are, it would be fun to add on more of that into our dino activities. Where we live in Indiana is actually a superb place to explore for fossils--a shallow prehistoric sea left lots of little ocean critter fossils, and a glacier later on the same site kept the bedrock from being too covered with subsequent layers of earth, so now you can easily fossil hunt (where it's legal) in most creeks, road cuts, and limestone quarries (but not caves! All the Indiana caves and sinkholes are closed to the public this year in hopes of stopping White Nose Syndrome from spreading. Sucks).

Perhaps we could even find a brachoid!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

To Remember Her By

Willow's favorite teacher won't be returning to Montessori next year. In a school in which classrooms encompass three "grades", transitions out of the class are a big deal. Graduating kindergarteners will be honored in an intimate ceremony on the last day of class (Montessori is big into ceremonies, I think you might have gathered), and I think the students are also preparing a different sort of celebration to honor their departing teacher.

As part of that, we parents were given a 12"x12" piece of scrapbook paper and asked to make a page with our child to present to the teacher at the ceremony. So in between breakfast (peanut butter sandwiches and watermelon, prepared and eaten and cleaned up after completely by delighted little girls, who think that being in charge of their own breakfast is the height of grown-up luxury) and laundry and goofing around (the girls with bubbles and Dinosaur Bingo; me with Awkward Family Photos--I'm totally going to submit some from my own childhood) and lunch (me this time, maximizing the usage of the peanut butter and bread demolished in the making of breakfast) and drawing out on the back deck and bullying Willow through getting ready for school (only two more days, I told her, and then yes, you can wear your shorts without panties), the girls and I made this scrapbook page for Willow's sweet teacher:
It looks a little funky where I awkwardly stitched two separate scans together in Photoshop (whenever my scanner finally craps out--and it has lasted FOREVER--I am buying the scanner with the largest scanning bed that will fit in my house), and the color scheme scanned a little strange (Is the scanner starting to crap out, I wonder?), but it's a pretty accurate estimation overall.

The photo mats are some pieces of upholstery remnant that I had cut and sewn to be coasters, but I didn't like them and threw them in the scrap pile. The photos themselves, and Willow's name, are printed on a sheet of printable fabric--I didn't use my Bubble Jet Set because it takes some time to soak and air-dry, and I was, of course, over deadline with this page. Nifty little trick--super-saturate your print job when you print on fabric, because the fabric sucks up so much ink that otherwise your photos will come out a lot lighter than you'd intended.

Willow drew and decorated the hearts with Sharpies on brown paper bag, and then I cut them out (oh, the tragic cutting of lefties! While the girls were drawing on the brown paper, I actually drew and cut out some practice cutting pages for them--I'll show you those some other time, because they're neat-o) and hand-stitched them on with buttons and red thread. Will also put her handprint, done in brown acrylic paint, on the bottom right upholstery mat, and then I machine-stitched the upholstery mats to the scrapbook page and the fabric photo prints to the upholstery mats. Done and done.

Now for end-of-the-year gifts for all three teachers...

Monday, May 18, 2009

Afghans Aren't Safe Around Me, Either

I freakin' LOVE the summer! I was able to cook, play a dinosaur board game with the girls (Yep, they do make them--we have three), do some yardwork, gaze in wonder at the incredible foods on This is Why You're Fat (I'm not sure if that stuff is supposed to look delicious, but it totally does), blog, and destroy an old, re-gifted afghan in order to sew this completely impractical but soft and summery dress for my kiddo:
I actually even sewed my first pattern for it, sort of. A couple of weeks ago at Thrift Shop (my newest fave, and where I also bought the upholstery sample books that I've been crafting the crap out of), I picked up some vintage sewing patterns that I thought looked pretty easy:

Awesome, right? It's something that I totally know how to sew already, but creating the pattern pieces myself would just be a pain in the butt. Awesomely as well, all the pattern pieces are present! The jumper pattern was even completely uncut until I got my hands on it, although the jumpsuit pattern was clearly well-used, which is also good, because I can assume that it works.

I say that I only sort of sewed to a pattern, however, because I used the front and back pattern pieces for the jumper but I didn't bother with the notches, the interfacing, the buttons, or the instructions--I already pretty much knew how I wanted to sew the afghan, so I'll save the real-live jumper business for later, I suppose.

I'm very pleased with how Will's dress turned out (eventually--it took the entire afghan to get there, which isn't exactly as waste-less as I like to flaunt myself, but now that I know what I'm doing the next thrifted afghan will have a fate that includes at least TWO dresses, and perhaps even three. And also? A couple of bonnets. And maybe a little matching bag).

Which is good, because the baby's all, "Where MY pretty dress, Momma?"

P.S. I FINALLY figured out how to turn my button alphabets into digital downloads. Check out the 8x10 button alphabet digital download and the 4x5 button alphabet digital download over in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

Friday, May 15, 2009

It is Released Into the World

I said I would write a book and lo! a book was written. Well, so far just a book proposal:

Not only was there just your general run-of-the-mill writing, but there were also projects to invent and tutorials to write for the projects, and photos to take for the tutorials, and Matt did a TON of design work for me, from the overall proposal package down to creating diagrams and helping me professionalize my pattern pieces. I don't know how anyone manages to put together a book proposal without a professional graphic designer in her family. It was a CRAZY amount of work, but seriously engrossing, as well, as I'm sure you can imagine.

So today some proposals are wending their way off to some agents who wanted to see one, and tonight:

Champagne?

Disaster movie?

Trip to the comic book store?

Sitting alone and staring at the wall, infused with the feeling of exhausted relief?

It's weird, but I cannot even think of a celebration celebratory enough.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Self-Portrait at Four Years and Ten Months

One of the works at Will's Montessori preschool is Self-Portrait--at its own little table, the teachers have set up a mirror, large papers, and art supplies. At four years and ten months, here is Willow's self-portrait:


I've mentioned before how touched I am by how Willow sees and how she tends to make so beautiful the things that she's seen, but this is the first time, I think, that she's turned that focused sight upon herself.

I have been increasingly interested, though, in how Willow does see herself, because the heart of her latest growth stage has manifested in an hysterical shyness. It's hard to watch, both because I'm miserably shy myself and so I know how small and shameful that often makes me feel, but also because I'm so freakin' proud of my kids, and I can hardly stand it that Will's increasingly unwilling not just to show herself off, but also simply to participate.

School birthday, then, was pretty sad for me inside of my own head. You might remember that last year I cried to watch my kid participate in her class' beautiful ceremony--carrying the globe around the ellipse as many times as the Earth has circled the sun since she was born, listening with her teachers and schoolmates as her dad and I read her biography, standing in the middle of the ellipse while the rest of the class sings the "Tall Tree" song to her. Will did want, desperately, to carry the globe around the ellipse, but she just couldn't hack it. Heck, she could barely stand to even exist in this world while Matt read her biography:
(Excuse my inelegant removal of little faces that don't belong to me. I should have just painted the entire background black, perhaps?)

Thank gawd that school birthday includes a feast of healthy party food, or she probably would have insisted on skipping school altogether that day: I did, however, with no apologies, boot her into the circle with the other birthday honorees so that we could sing the "Tall Tree" song to her. That song is my favorite part of her entire birthday experience, including her real birthday and family party and party with friends, etc. (the walk around the ellipse holding the globe being my second favorite part of her entire birthday experience, OF COURSE). And if I'm going to struggle, in a mere two months, through the making of an ice cream cake with cookies on top, as the birthday child is currently demanding (is it just me, or are the birthday cake requests getting increasingly elaborate each year?), then I am going to have my favorite moment.

I figure you're allowed to tell compassionate parenting to suck it once every few months. Am I right or am I right?

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

My First Day of Vacay

Ah, the bliss of the first day of summer vacation! I don't know how y'all non-teachers can handle your lives without the prospect of a 3.5 month break every year.

Wanna get jealous? Here's what I did on my first day of summer vacation:

I get up, Matt makes me some coffee, I drink it while reading Margo Rising, my newest web obsession--it's a snarky review, in order, of all the Sweet Valley High books. I did not realize during my young teen years, when I was reading those books for real, that Jessica Wakefield is a sociopath. She is, though. Cold, dead blue-green eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean and all.

After Matt goes off to work (poor dear), the girls and I spend HOURS making my Papa's biscuits. Seriously, hours. The dough was well-kneeded, I assure you:
They turned out pretty well, I think, considering that I used olive oil instead of Crisco and whole wheat flour instead of self-rising white and regular milk + vinegar instead of buttermilk. Oh, and I burned them.

So we eat ourselves some biscuits and then we go outside, where I do a RIDICULOUS amount of heavy yardwork. Seriously, I was literally gasping for breath after struggling with our reel-powered motor back and forth across the random, uneven hill in our side yard. I didn't even get anything planted or weed-whacked, which were my other goals for the morning, although the sunflower babies are up and so we can plant the cranberry beans now, and we have the potting soil that Willow's bachelor's buttons need, finally.

Back inside, I make the girls a lunch that they do not eat and bully Willow through dressing for school, tooth-brushing, hair-combing, shoe-tying, etc. Sydney plays until Matt gets back from taking Willow to school, and he puts her down for a nap while I eat cheese and bread and barbecue Baked Lay's leftover from the previous night's drive-in date.

I spend a while making some text changes and futzing over the book proposal, which I have GOT to stop futzing over and just mail, for Christ's sake.

The laminator is still out from when I was making craft fair signs (I looooove my laminator), and so I experiment with laminating some comic book panels I'd cut out. I am very pleased with how they turned out:It's a way to use them but keep them archivally safe, and unlike the comic panels backed with acid-free cardstock that I put in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, you can see both sides of the comic book page on these. After I experiment some more, I might add these to my shop, too.

While I cut out the laminated comic book panels, I catch up on Dollhouse and The Office on Hulu.

When Syd wakes up from her nap, I get her dressed and we go get Will from school. I want to go buy another printer ink cartridge after that (I swear, everytime I print something I feel like I am bleeding money), but Will has to pee and Syd is thirsty, so we just go home. The girls run in and out of the house and play for a couple of hours while I do some laundry and some dishes and look under couch cushions and behind the bed to try to find all the library books that are overdue.

When Matt gets home, I enlist him into FINALLY moving my compost bin to where I want it to be while Willow and I mend my jeans:
She's getting pretty handy with the seam ripper.

While I go inside to finish mending my jeans I let Willow borrow my camera to take some photos outside, and later I find some nice photos on the camera--
--and also all these photos that imply that she'd been running around the yard sticking my VERY expensive camera into holes and garbage cans and underneath the back porch, etc. Shudder.

We need to cook some ears of corn so Matt makes burgers while I straighten the living room and the girls play a "math game" on the computer:
Don't tell them that their "game" is just flash card drills, because they LOVE it. I set it to just give them arithmetic problems in the ones and twos because I'm encouraging Willow not to necessarily work the problem each time, but to see if she can remember the answer from the last time she worked it. Oh, and she accidentally wrote The Devil's Number:

Matt and I laughed and laughed, but don't even bother explaining to a kid why it's funny.

During dinner it turns out that Matt forgot to actually cook the corn, so we'll likely have burgers again tonight.

After dinner I wrote up a Crafting a Green World blog post about mending my jeans while the girls laid down with Matt and fell asleep while he played video games. I went in there like an hour later, only to find Matt sound asleep, as well. So I read some Neil Gaiman comics in the other bed.

Matt did wake up from his nap later, but that's another story...

Monday, May 11, 2009

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.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

That's My Daughter, In the Water

Dedicated to all mothers, of course, but most particularly to the mothers of little girls:

My Mother's Day celebration? Breakfast at the playground this morning, followed by heavy yardwork, continuing momentarily into painting on the back porch, and finished off tonight by a trip to the drive-in.

Perhaps we'll listen to Loudon Wainwright on the way there...

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Caterpillar

"Momma! Momma!" Willow yells, barreling up to me as I transplant ditch lilies from one garden to another (both in the quadrant of front yard that Matt resents me for planting in, as we both know it's the best part of our property, and HE dreams of a baseball field-like expanse of green lawn). "I found a CATERPILLAR!"

Obviously, I run for the camera (as if Willow is not finding caterpillars and roly-poly bugs and earthworms and grasshoppers all day long, each one the subject of its own photo shoot), and spend several minutes taking photos of the caterpillar, as Willow, an old hand at Momma's photography, does her best to show it off in the best light and at the best angle.

When I'm finally finished and about to stand up and pick my shovel back up, Willow says, "Here, Momma, you hold the caterpillar now, and I'll take YOUR picture with it."

As if the caterpillar is some sort of celebrity, and we're the fangirls with our cellphones out begging for pics.

I hadn't thought of having my photo taken today, or of holding a caterpillar in my dirty hands, but I do what my daughter tells me, and she takes my photo:

I feel good about myself, seeing me through her eyes.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Joy of Three

The joy of adding a third button to the birthday crown, the joy of wearing that crown all day, the joy of Willow's preschool teacher saying to you, "What a beautiful crown!" and getting to say back, "Iss my BIRFDAY!!!"

The joy of choosing exactly what cake you want Momma to bake with you (chocolate and stair-steps and pink frosting and rainbow candy), and helping to bake that cake and make the frosting and decorate it, and being too young to know that Momma is TERRIBLE in the kitchen and thus that the cake will look far less like the fairy-pink tiers that she imagined and more like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which Richard Dreyfuss sculpts the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes only pink and with M&Ms melting down it, and the joy of running sobbing to Momma that you broke your big 3 candle when you weren't supposed to be playing with it and having Momma call Daddy at work and having Daddy bring a new 3 candle with him when he gets home, and the joy of seeing your brand-new big 3 candle lit on your hideous pink cake, and the joy of having a sister help you blow it out again (twice):
(It really does look like the Devil's Tower only pink, doesn't it?)

The joy of being a big girl, so big that your Momma for the first time is not haunted so much this year by memories of you in the NICU, and the joy of getting big-girl gifts, a huge stash of Land Before Time toys that Momma bought for you off of ebay and bartered for you from friends (the Anna bunting is in the works, Jenny!).

For me, though, the best gift of all--the joy of being your mother:

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Good Eaters

My kids are not picky, thank goodness. They have a lot of "eccentricities" (Will cried herself to sleep in my lap tonight because she does NOT want to walk five times around the ellipse while holding the globe at her school birthday next week. This is great, because her teachers already think I'm a total stage mom), but fussy eating is not one of them.

It's spoiled me as a mom, though. The other day a little friend was over for a playdate with Will, and I served them a snack of peanut butter sandwiches, sliced apples, and frozen blueberries. The kid was all, "I don't eat any of this kind of food," and I was all, "Okay, your mom will have dinner for you tonight, I'm sure." And then my kids ate her share, too.

It's too bad my girlies don't have a gourmet chef for a mother, because they're probably like food savants or something, but we'll never know because I serve them some basic ten-minute-prep combination of protein, two fruits/vegetables, and fiber and/or dairy at nearly every meal. Spring is a good season for us, though--we've got some nice, fresh, local foods coming in that we haven't tasted for a while, and then it must be like a fall harvest time in the southern hemisphere or something, because we scored ourselves a bounty of pineapples and avocados and bananas at the store this week (not local, no, and certainly not organic, except for the bananas, but we are pure suckers, plain and simple, for pineapples and avocados).

So last night we had "Big Salad," which is what the girls dub it when I fill all the little compartments on their dinner trays with nice, raw, delicious things--kale, pineapple, sesame seeds, apple and orange slices, bananas, avocado--and some bread, cheese, and soysage, too, of course:
It was yummy, says the look of their faces, and such a nice change from the root vegetables and pastas and casseroles of the winter:
The nice thing about these kids, though, is that they help me to expand in all my capacities. We have had a juicer since our wedding day, and we have not used it once. And yet, at some point I must have mentioned the existence of said juicer to my children (I can't believe I even remembered it), because they have been asking me off and on for months to get out the juicer and make them some juice. I stalled them all winter, because there's just not an ample-enough produce stock in the winter to justify playing with a juicer, but with two pineapples and a big bag of kale and a bunch of bananas and a bag each of apples and oranges hanging around the kitchen, I could stall no longer, and so we juiced: And juicing? Is awesome. It's so easy that Syd can feed the juicer independently, if I stand near and unnecessarily warn her every two minutes to watch her fingers. We made juice All. Freakin' Day (This also might be because we were stuck inside as workers dismantled the tree next door, branch by branch, pausing only to sit on their coolers in the shade in between the houses and talk trash about my lawn, apparently not realizing that our windows are open and I can HEAR THEM--dudes, my yard is not THAT bad, and I LIKE the grass long, and we EAT the dandelions so of course we're not going to spray them). Kale and pineapple is the best combination, in my opinion, although the girls' juice was pretty much just a composite of every single thing--kale, pineapple, orange, apple, banana--every single time.
But yeah. Awesome nevertheless.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Happy Free Comic Book Day!

I hope you went by your favorite indie comic book store yesterday and gave them some love--and got your four free comics!
I was happy to see that our favorite comic book store, Vintage Phoenix, was super-crowded yesterday, and doing a pretty hopping business, too. I managed to support them with my own two dollars and change (I looooooove the 25-cent comics bins). The girls, handed down the solemn honor of being able to pick out four free comics EACH, spent themselves quite some time perusing the possibilities...
Owly was back again this year. Owly is an AWESOME comic for pre-readers because it tells the story without words--it's still linear, though, so it's excellent independent reading practice. Oh, and it's really good:
We're going to read all the comics I bought, of course, but of course you all know their ultimate fate:
Yep, I craft with comics.

If you had some doubts that perhaps I'm not a rabid-enough fangeek, check out all the comics stuff up in my etsy shop:

And, um...that doesn't even include the stuff I'm going to make from the comics I bought yesterday.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Crafty Garden

While my Matt did design work on my book proposal all day, the girls and I spent breakfast-time-- (yep, we even have to dye our cream cheese pink around here) to dinner time--
(What? You don't permit your preschoolers to have a nice candlelit dinner every now and then?) wreaking havoc in the garden.

There were blossoms to pick off of things that I wish the girls wouldn't pick blossoms off of:

And dinosaurs to romp amongst the birdhouse gourd seedlings (and mulch leftover from the neighborhood clean-up day!):
Other components of my crafty garden are bushel basket gourds, lavender, rosemary, spearmint, catnip, and sunflowers. I'm hoping to grow my pole beans up my sunflower stalks, by the way--that sounds reasonable, right? I'm also hoping to include some obviously reclaimed elements into my garden design--powder blue sink I found by the side of the road YEARS ago, a couple of old drawers, etc.

The girls also had a ball picking out critters from our yummy compost harvest:

And we managed to completely uproot an entire ant colony--oops:

Yep. All day, a trip to the recycling center for newspapers and cardboard, and several emergency consultations with , and I managed to plant, like, eight things.

You're not going to believe the crazy-best news, though--this worker came over to our house this afternoon and warned us not to park our cars on the street on Monday or Tuesday because our next-door-neighbor's sugar maple tree is rotted out and they're going to have to cut the whole thing down.


He's talking about the sugar maple that sits JUST SOUTHEAST OF MY FRONT GARDEN PLOT!!!

I may just have one spot in my yard this summer that can accurately be described as "full sun"!!!

Rest in peace, next-door-neighbor's sugar maple. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

P.S. I've finally had some time to list the first of my vintage button alphabet. Check it out in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

Friday, May 1, 2009

We're All Going to Be Max

I swear that I'm not a fan of book-t0-movie adaptations, and an entire movie based on a picture book? And yet...

Where the Wild Things Are looks AWESOME!!!

It might be the song that makes me so happy, because I'm a fan of Arcade Fire, but also, that Max costume kills me. So iconic, nostalgic but not in a saccharine way, because Where the Wild Things Areis all about childhood angst. Who can't relate to that?

And the release date is October 16. Know what that means?

Well, Will expended quite the amount of energy last year thinking up a Halloween costume, but she won't have to this year, because this year I am going to make them each a Max costume.

And perhaps one for myself...

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Cookies and Course Evaluations

I looked up this morning from finishing up posting grades on a few last homeworks to find a monkey in the mulberry tree:
I stuck my head out the window to say hi, and Willow mentioned she was stuck, so we discussed some strategies for remedying that unfortunate situation--Will's first suggestion was that she climb further out onto the branch to make it bend lower to the ground, which I actually thought was pretty clever, but I had to point out that it just seemed a little too risky to try. Eventually she compromised with my suggestion that she wasn't so high that she couldn't lower herself from the limb, hang by her hands, and then drop to the ground. I'm very big on proper dropping procedure--loose muscles, land on your feet, immediately let yourself fall onto your butt--so it ended up going pretty well.

That, however, was not the big adventure for the day, because today was (Hallelujah!!!) my last class of the semester! My students drive me nuts, and I never do grow to like all of them, but over the course of the semester I do become very fond of most of them, and extremely fond of a few of them. They're usually funny, most of them, and sincere, and pretty good sports, and on the last day of classes I like to bake them cookies. It's my secret way of giving them a little love.

Some semesters I go homemade, some semesters I go straight Pillsbury, but this semester I went for Pillsbury with homemade cream cheese icing. I've got some professional-grade food coloring, and I had this whole plan to let the girls explore color mixing, but why the hell would you want to discuss the difference between a dye and a pigment and what a tone is versus what a shade is when you could just be doing this? Or this? Ah, well. It was a Practical Life exercise, in that I taught them how to mix the icing inside a sealed plastic bag and then cut a corner off of the bag to decorate with it, and an exercise in Good Works for Others, in that we decorated the cookies not for ourselves, but for my students. We'll do color mixing tomorrow.

My cookies are pretty luscious-looking, I think, with the course number of the composition class I teach iced on top: Pretty festive, don't you think?

The girls' cookies, however, are in a world of their own:

I let them decorate with some of the Ouchie Candy Stash (you and your sister only get a piece if one of you is SERIOUSLY hurt, real tears, no faking) which itself is left over from a holiday gingerbread house.

But don't worry--there are a couple of cookies (and a couple of cold beers) left over for my own private end of the semester celebration. Because I'm fond of them, but they were still assholes for most of the semester, and also?

I have 42 final papers to grade now.

P.S. Check out my rules for tree climbing over at Eco Child's Play.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

In Which My Button Fancy Gets a Little Ridiculous

So you might remember that one of my ongoing projects is to incorporate some digital design into my product line--prints, perhaps, or digital collage elements, or even scrapbooking supplies. It seems like a better long-term crafting choice, since I can continue to get payback from the same piece of work over and over, along with the physical handicraft option of one payback for each piece of work that I craft.

Add to this the crazy amount of time that I've been spending lately rifling through my button collection, futzing around to make monograms and such (I'm also trying to reinvent the button ring--more on that later), and I've been thinking that likely the whole world would really pretty much enjoy digital access to all my beautiful physical buttons. I listened to this one episode of the some crafty podcast in which Maggie Taylor Carroll, who did this super-awesome digitally illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ( Other illustrated Wonderlands that I like are ) talked about how many elements of her work were made from actual stuff that she just threw on the scanner and scanned, and...
I'd title it "Button Porn," but when I titled a Crafting a Green World post Quilt Porn a few months ago, I got some weird traffic.

But see, that's not even porn-y enough for you, is it? I know that you're looking at the big scan, and you're thinking, "All those buttons make me so happy, but they're so small that I can't really see the detail in each button. Darn!"

Here you go, then:


So now instead of just futzily gluing and hand-sewing buttons to make each monogram, I can first futzily lay the buttons that I want to use out on the scanner and scan them, and then later I'll be able to futz around some more with the digital images of the buttons!

My summer is looking so fly, I tell you.

In other news, it's a rainy morning here. That means that instead of letting the girls run around outside for hours on end (they keep taking their pants off outside! What's UP with that?), we'll be spending a hoppin' few hours on...
You guessed it. Dinosaur Bingo.