Outsourcing My Quilt Designs

I'm sewing a T-shirt quilt for my little cousin Katie this Christmas (this is no secret, or otherwise I imagine she'd have been asking her mom, "Where are all my T-shirts?"). After cutting out all the pieces for a one-block quilt from Katie's T-shirts, Willow found me on her bed yesterday, about to lay out a design for the quilt on top of her comforter. Will asked if she could lay out the quilt, instead, and never one to turn down an offer of unpaid labor, I agreed:
The final design certainly wasn't the kind of pattern I would have made it into, but it wasn't random, either, and although it's not something that I'd permit Willow to have free reign on in a quilt for a paying customer, she adores her big cousin Katie, and I was happy to give her the chance to add something permanent to Katie's world:
Sydney served as photo-documentarian for the event, catching Willow deep in concentration as she figures out some key detail in her layout:Catching me taking the pieces back up in the exact right order to ensure that I sew them correctly:And then catching us in post-layout celebration:
Now it just needs to be pieced, backed, bound, and wrapped.

Sweatpants, Skirts, and Teaching Tops

One thing about living in a university town and working at that university is that you meet a lot of undergrads. Matt works with interns and the Student Alumni Association club, and as for me, I've got 40 or so freshmen that I engage in conversation and woo into some semblance of understanding of the analytical process and its reflection in rhetoric for three hours twice a week, not counting office hours.

And when you talk to undergrads that much for that long, you 1) gain a terrific understanding of popular television (I swear, half my students are writing their final papers on The Girls Next Door), and 2) do NOT gain an understanding of contemporary fashion. Um, why do I want sweatpants with words written on the butt?

And leggings came back? Seriously?

And apparently (because we had an entire conversation about this), you're still supposed to tan in the winter, but not as much because you don't want to get too dark, and you have to REALLY tan, like in the booth, because everyone can tell when you've spray-tanned because it DEF looks orange.

All this is to say that I don't dress like a freshman, but I bet you could have figured that out on your own. If there was a Torrid in town I'd probably throw my second-hand shopping ethic out the window--hell, I'd probably have my own Torrid card the way my mama used to have a Dillard's card because she bought so much there--but until then, I rely on the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale days and going through every piece of clothing in the store to find a few pieces that I like. So I bought low-rise cargo pants and a couple of tops designed to show off the tons of money that I have invested in a really great bra (my friend Molly calls these "boob tops").

I bought Matt a few more pairs of sweatpants, because he likes to go to the gym every night while I'm putting the girls to bed (chapter from whatever book we're reading, episode of Meerkat Manor, sitting in the dark goofing off on the computer while playing Pandora and waiting for snores).

And I bought the girls skirts:
And skirts:

And yet more skirts: Syd is the one who is obessed with skirts and dresses (dubbed "quitty kwothes"). Will likes herself a pair of good, soft pants, but will also wear the same dinosaur T-shirt for as many days as it take for me to get sick of it and rip it off of her body. Sydney will change entire outfits four times a day, easy (each time putting the entire old outfit in the dirty laundry, unless I catch her. This is one of the reasons that I'm teaching the girls to do their own laundry this month), and actually has a knack for putting together really interesting outfits that somehow work.

And she only has a few skirts, mostly Momma-made and thus all of the same style. So I skirted them up.

Also bought during the sale: a keyboard that may or may not work for lessons, so we'll do some research before the return period is up; a picturebook of Longfellow's Hiawatha poem; a tiny little loaf pan (Matt is all, "What are you going to make with this?" "Um, tiny little loaves?"); and yet another little horse.

Still on the must-buy-secondhand list: ice cream maker, new-ish crockpot (there are tons of older crockpots in thrift stores, but they're supposed to be fire hazards or something), and a black hoodie and an AWESOME cool-looking grey denim jacket with a stripe on the sleeve to replace those same articles of clothing, both bought previously at Goodwill, that I have left at one time or another in my classroom on campus and thus lost, leaving me broken-hearted.

Although if some other freshman stole my clothes, that does mean that they were up to their trendy freshman standards, I suppose.

DIY Wipe-Off Handwriting Sheets for the Littles

As it is now December, I should be concentrating on making gifts for family and friends, and shepherding the girls through making their gifts, as well, but something about being required to work on a deadline just makes me...rebel.

And so that's why, even though my To-Do list for yesterday read, partially, "take girls to gymnastics, buy coffee creamer, answer student emails, grade Project #5 rough drafts, START KATIE'S QUILT," I instead, while loading the dishwasher (for the second time that day), had a brilliant idea for making some wipe-off handwriting/vocab sheets for some of the books that the girls have been especially into lately.

And after I finished loading the dishwasher, instead of getting out the template for cutting out the pieces to Katie's quilt, I dragged out an old handwriting tablet and the laminator and immediately made ten or so wipe-off handwriting/vocab sheets.

To do this, you just need a child's handwriting tablet, a nice fat marker, and a laminator. Children's handwriting tablets are larger than your typical notebook paper, so if you're using a laminator designed for that particular width, you will need to trim your paper before you begin.

On the left side of each line on the tablet, write a vocabulary word yourself in your best printing (ugh). Make two pages of vocabulary words, because you might as well make your handwriting page double-sided. I themed mine based on the books the girls and I have been reading over and over lately--Little House in the Big Woods, with words like "Ma," "Pa," "Laura," "Mary," and "Minnesota;" Bambi, with words like "Bambi," "Mother," "Father," "Faline," "Gobo," and "Old Prince;" The Nutcracker, with words like "Tchaikovsky," "Clara," "Nutcracker," and "Sugarplum Fairy," and "The Night Before Christmas," with the names of all the reindeer, of course (it's "Donder," not "Donner"--did you know?).

Line up two pages neatly back-to-back, and then laminate them. Because I've organized most of the girls' paper-based activities into a file folder box, I stapled a file folder into a pocket, and stapled an envelope on the front of the pocket to hold a dry-erase marker and a flannel cloth for wiping off the marker.

And then, the next morning while you're reading the newspaper and drinking a nice, big mug of coffee, your girls can practice reading their pages:
Using a dry-erase marker, they can trace over your words:
They can copy your words: And when they're done, they can wipe the marker off with their little flannel cloth:

Because this is how I enable myself to drink an entire cup of coffee in peace.

When It's Raining Outside, Jump Around Inside

Most of our local gymnastics studios do this completey ingenious thing--a couple of mornings a week for an hour or so, they open up their entire studio to free play by preschoolers. All the equipment, all the space, all the stuff. At four bucks per kid, it's an activity that's too expensive for me to take the girls to regularly, at least not when there are so many good free activities geared to preschoolers nearly every weekday morning, but one gym, Rising Star, occasionally offers this open play time free for an entire month.

And thus begins our month of regularly-scheduled antics:I never took gymnastics classes as a child, so a lot of this stuff I'm just guessing at, but I think that this long trampoline must be used for practicing floor routines, like flipping and stuff:

The deep pit of foamies is probably a likely landing spot for vaults, jumps, or high bar work, but it also works for belly-flopping and wallowing:My favorite thing about the open play time is that, unlike most of the other activities for small children that we do regularly--storytime at the public library, Discovery Time at Wonderlab, puppet shows and teddy bear tea parties and such--I do NOT bring a book to open play. I wear my yoga pants and my sports bra, and I will happily wait in line with a bunch of three-year-olds for a turn on the giant trampoline. And that time that I got stuck in the pit of foamies and couldn't quite haul my own butt out and that stay-at-home dad laughed at me, I didn't even care.

Because by god, that pit of foamies RULEZ!!!

It's also funny to see how much braver my kids are than I am. Oh, how I long to fling myself from the top of the pommel horse like a cat on a sparrow:Will does any kind of leaping and daredevil work, but Syd seems especially fond of the balance beam these days:And of course, she's perfectly happy to swing for just as long as anyone is willing to push her:So, do they look like they're having fun, or what?

And we get to go back again on Friday!

Kids' Card Making: The Super-Simple Sticker Card

After playing around all they wanted to with the collage cards and the paper doll cards-- --the girls still had just a couple more cards that they needed to make for their Kids Craft Weekly Christmas card swap, so I pulled out the stickers:

I go back and forth on stickers--sometimes I hate them and think that they're wasteful and cause too much mess and aren't a creative tool, and other times I think that they're fun and portable and pretty mess-free and can be used quite creatively. My opinion on this depends, I think, on how many stickers we have in the house and, if we don't have any stickers in the house, how long it has been since we've had some.

The last time I bought foam stickers was last year during a big post-Halloween sale, I think, so there's been plenty of time for their absence to make my sticker-heart grow fonder. And I have been making it a habit (for a while, now, so hopefully it's not just a phase!) to be much more disciplined with the girls and with myself about keeping our environment neat and tidy--and boy, that's a lot of work, but it is nicer not to have sticker wrappers all over the house. Or uncapped markers. Or library books. Or whatever else I used to be too tired to keep up a constant hassle about.

However, with this last sticker purchase the stars aligned, and I bought a LOT. It was one of those Black Friday businesses when I was already at Michael's (I just happened to be there, you know, just to pick up a few things, only to find all these people standing in line just to get in the store! Weird!), and so their entire stock of foam stickers was marked down by 50%, and I had a coupon in hand for an additional 25% off of my total purchase, which meant that each of the sticker sets that I bought for the girls was $3, not including tax.

And that's why the girls have on their art shelves not just the Christmas set that they used to make their last Christmas cards, but, um, a dinosaur set, and an alphabet set, and an outer space set.

And in a month or so, when I am sick unto death of all these damn stickers again, I'll remember that at least I didn't buy the pirate set or the princess set. So there.

Just a Simple Photo of My Girls

The girls' Christmas cards (from their Kids Craft Weekly card swap) are in the mail right this minute, but the very last thing that we needed to do before sending them off was to take a photo of the girls to include with each card. Since neither girl is really up to writing a personal note in each card I thought it would be a nice way to bring them to life for these little recipients who have never met them--and I wanted to sneak in my blog's address, because you know how much I love attention.



I allotted two minutes right before it was time to walk out the door for school for this task--the girls are clean and dressed with hair and teeth brushed, and anyway, how long can it take to snap one decent, normal photo?The winner!
Now all that's left is managing the level of hysterical excitement until our own card swap cards start arriving in the mail.

Kids' Card Making: The Paper Doll Card

The cards for the girls' Kids Craft Weekly card swap are all finished up, and the monkeys are sitting at my feet right this minute writing up some semblance of a signature and holiday greeting (after one card, Willow abandoned her planned "Happy Christmas to all" as too time-consuming and began to make do, instead, with "Will"). When they're done with that, it's the momma's job snap a photo of the two angels looking angelic together and send it to the dadda, whose job it is to add my blog address to the bottom of the photo and print off ten color copies and bring them home to the babies, whose job it will be (with the momma's supervision) to stuff the envelopes and seal them, and then we'll all go off to mail them together.

I had planned to sneak in some geographical learnin' this week all about the places that the cards are going to--everywhere from Australia to Ohio--but I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll be unable to peel the children's eyes away from anything overtly CHRISTMAS!!! this month.

This set of paper doll cards was extremely time-consuming to make, but the girls LOVED it, and worked absorbedly on the activity until they'd run out of doll clothes, which I couldn't cut out from the Cricut as fast as they could glue, especially with all the turn-taking and choosing of scrapbook papers and outfit choices, etc. etc.

You can do this kind of card with any sort of homemade or boughten paper dolls, of course, but since the girls and I happen to be obsessed right now with our new Paper Dolls Dress-Up Cricut cartridge (bought for a song during a Michael's doorbuster, at least, and well worth it), that is of course what we used.

It's tricky to get exactly the right size of paper doll with the Cricut, however, if you're measuring by width, because the Cricut offers measurements only by length. For instance, I didn't particularly care how tall these paper dolls were, but I did need them to be a little less than 3.5" wide, because I wanted our cards to fit in standard envelopes. So I actually had to experiment a little with various heights until I discovered that a 5"-tall paper doll is just a smidge less than 3.5" wide. Fortunately, the girls were happy to take over my mis-fires.

The nice thing about the Cricut, however, is that once you know the height of your paper doll, you can just input that same measurement to cut out all the clothes and accessories that are proportionate to that doll, so I could use 5" for everything from the hairbow to the Christmas tree. I don't use that feature as often with the font catridges, because if I want a single lower-case p, I generally want that p to be exactly the size I want it, not proportionate to the upper case P that I'm not going to print, but with the paper dolls cartridge, it's an extremely useful feature.

I've been playing with using the Cricut cut-outs as templates for making paper dolls and clothes out of recycled papers like magazine pages or comic books, and I have some big plans of also using them as templates to cut out some things for the girls' big felt board, but these Christmas cards are all done with scrapbook paper:
I tried to plan for the cards to be at least winter-themed by asking the girls to choose clothes and things that someone would use in the winter. Sydney was really bad at this, but with her, you never can tell if she's not doing something because she doesn't understand the concept, or because she'd just rather do whatever the hell she wants--either way, it's an activity to repeat a few times. Will enjoyed that aspect of the game, however, and came up with some fun cards:

The card swap is for children of all ages, and whereas when the girls did their Artist Trading Card swap they were sorted into a group of age-mates, here I think that at least some of their partners are quite older than they are. For that reason, I did want the cards the girls' sent to be fairly neatly done and reasonable as Christmas cards, and so although I obviously didn't direct or criticize their work, I did sort the cards into a small stack for the swap, and a biiiiiig stack to send to our own family and friends.

Grandma Beck might better appreciate Sydney's card, which consists of about 40 items of doll clothes glued smack on top of one doll with a big mound of glue, which was then colored on, than some anonymous ten-year-old in Canada might.

When a three-year-old works for most of an hour on ANYTHING, I don't care what it ends up looking like--it's automatically a masterpiece.

Paper Dolls, or, Ode to My Cricut

On Thanksgiving Day, after a DELICIOUS early Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy-schmancy local restaurant (Sydney was all, "Why does that man keep give me more water?" I'm all, "That's a waiter, sweetie"), we finished just in time to load our full bellies into the car and drive across town to the Michael's store, which was opening with its Black Friday sales that Thursday from 5-8 pm. I had the sales flyer, which listed one of the doorbusters as Cricut cartridges on HUGE sale, and an additional coupon for 25% off my total purchase, and additionally, I was stoked that I wouldn't even have to consider waking up early on Friday.

We get to Michael's just a couple of minutes early, and there's a line waiting for the store to open, but up we trek in our fancy clothes, happy to just stand around and digest for a bit. A few other people line up behind us, and then this other lady walks up, and as soon as she gets to the back of the line she starts announcing, over and over, to whoever is listening, I suppose, that she can't believe that there's a line to get into Michael's. She just happened to drive over to pick up a few things, she announced, because she just happened to notice that it would be open, and she never dreamed that people would actually line up just to get in. She didn't even know what was supposed to be on sale, even, and look, she's just wearing the same clothes that she wore to make Thanksgiving dinner.

When the doors finally opened, Matt swears on his life that she shoved him trying to get inside.

I've never been to a store right when it opened for Black Friday before, and it actually was a little hairy, because I guess everybody wanted these pre-lit artificial Christmas trees that were stacked right by the door, but the beauty of being on a team is that I left Matt and Syd to grab a cart at their leisure and negotiate their way in, and Will and I dodged past the tree-hoarders and jockeyed for position in front of the Cricut cartridge display.

The other middle-aged female scrapbookers were sweet as pie there, of course, but were grabbing up cartridges like CRAZY, so Will and I basically grabbed up whatever we were even halfway interested in, too, and then took them all over to a quiet place for a closer look. I was plenty okay with the prospect of walking my unwanted cartridges back to a sales clerk for the opportunity to browse in peace.

I made some very careful choices, spent my entire remaining Cricut allowance (I'm relying on my swagbucks for my Cricut upkeep allowance), and ended up with some cartridges that the girls and I are THRILLED with.

And, obviously, they're the nerdiest of the cartridges. We turned up our noses completely at all the Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh nonsense, and ended up with, along with a couple of awesome fonts, a cartridge that has maps of the continents and countries and various icons from those locations (including lots of farm die-cuts, Willow was delighted to see--now we can make a silo!), a cartridge that does maps of the states AND their correct flags AND their correct birds (this was one of the cartridges that made me want to buy a Cricut in the first place, I'm that big of a nerd), a cartridge that does a massive menagerie of animals, and a cartridge that does paper dolls.

Hell, yeah. A cartridge that does paper dolls.

It organizes them by all these random costumes, so there's a bride and groom, for instance, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and a caveman and cavewoman (I know--whatever), and for each costume it's got a couple of options and some hair and some random stuff that would go with that costume. So, you can cut out a wedding dress for the bride and also a three-tiered wedding cake, and for the caveman you can cut out a volcano and also about four different dinosaurs (hmmm.....who do I know who loves dinosaurs?)

Needless to say, we have been playing with this cartridge ALL WEEKEND.

You can put the paper doll tabs on some of the clothes, but not, you know, the wedding cake or the palm tree or Santa's sleigh and stuff (did I mention that it has Santa and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and the requisite sleigh and reindeer and junk?), so the girls actually prefer to play with everything laid flat on the table, in these little two-dimensional scenes, and they've snookered me into cutting out for them tons of different outfits from scrapbook paper.

Here's one of Sydney's favorite outfits:
It's the shirt and pants to the groom's tuxedo with Frankenstein's hair, I think? And obviously, drawing the features on the doll itself is something of a highlight.

Here's Willow's favorite doll and outfit so far:

I'm not sure why all their doll selections manage to look sort of ghoulish AND sort of tranny chic, but there you go.

Oh, and the woman in the line in front of Michael's? Matt claims that she was checking out at the register next to us (an hour after she went in? So much for "just dropping by for a few things"), and he could hear her telling the cashier all about how she was so surprised there were so many people rushing in here on Thanksgiving, she just happened to be there herself and couldn't believe all those people standing in line before the store was even open, etc. etc.

Yes, lady, it's one of the lamest things a person can choose to do, to stand in front of a Michael's before it's even open, waiting to buy scrapbooking toys, but if you're gonna do it, hell, you might as well own it!

I wonder if I saw her again when I went to Joann's at 7 am on Saturday for THEIR Cricut doorbuster?

A Family Block-Building Enterprise

Our little town's Christmas lighting ceremony, in which the mayor turns on for the season the lights that extend from the courthouse to the roofs off all the buildings on all four sides of the town square, as well as the seasonal streetlights and the Christmas trees sponsored by various charities, has something for every kid. If you're a big kid who's way into the lights and the ceremony and the festivity, then that's what you've got in spades:
However, even if you're a little kid, and you're mostly just about "What is going on right NOW and how will affect ME?"...well, the guy who hands out the programs also has an ample supply of candy canes:We actually stayed in town for Thanksgiving in part, this year, so that Matt could go into work on Friday and save that extra vacation day. However, the Alumni Association unexpectedly (at least to Matt--I'm never quite sure how knowledgeable he is about basic company info like that) closed its offices on Friday, so we've had an extra-long holiday with our man, and we have all been THRILLED. The weekend's not even over, and not only has he cleaned the gutters and enabled me to go shopping ALONE and put up all the Christmas lights, but I can tempt him into staying up late with me much easier with nowhere to be the next day, and he can tempt me into goofing off for long periods of time much easier, knowing he'll be around to help out later.

Matt and I together are even bigger nerds than we are apart, so when we all got out the girls' ridiculously large number of building blocks (seriously, it's ridiculous, and yet if I walked into a Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale tomorrow and saw another thousand, I'd buy them in a heartbeat), while the girls did normal stuff, like build themselves a block city with block buildings and block people and block cars--
--Matt and I had to use the crazy-fancy Kapla blocks I bought years ago at a Wonderlab sale (if you're a block nerd like us, Kapla blocks are where it's AT!) to build a tower that touched the ceiling:Seriously, it touched the ceiling. Here's the view from up there, courtesy of Matt standing on a chair and holding the camera up above his head:I wanted to leave our tower up all night, but Matt feared a middle-of-the-night bathroom trip or curious cat rub that would cause everyone in the house to bolt upright in their beds, so here's the rapid-shot view from my camera, which can take several photos per second:
My favorite part is the expression on Matt's face. Yeah, if he's going to look like that and he KNEW the crash was coming, we were right not to risk a middle-of-the-night demolition.

Kids' Card-Making: The Collage Window Card

It just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV!
It's so fun to have the kids at these ages, because they don't have a huge memory for most things. Therefore, remembering, myself, how delighted and surprised they were to see the huge balloons in the Macy's parade on TV last Thanksgiving, I had my camera ready to catch the new delight and surprise on their faces when they saw the balloons this year.

They didn't really recognize any of the characters that the balloons were supposed to be ("CheeseBob!!!" shouted Willow, when the Spongebob Squarepants balloon came around a corner), but just the concept of HUGE BALLOON is apparently enough to thrill a kid.

Of course, in other ways it wasn't a typical Thanksgiving at all. For instance, our nice big library table, instead of being set for the traditional meal, spent the day looking like this:
All the better to spend the day making Christmas cards with, my dears.

It's been fun to try out several new and different card-making strategies with the girls this month. Some--the window card in which they create their own cut-outs, the window card in which they paint one panel with watercolor paints so that it can show through the window--are complete failures. Others, such as this window card that uses strips of wallpaper in a behind-the window collage, worked great for the five-year-old, the three-year-old, and the 33-year-old.
When the girls do art, of course I like to keep the level of instruction as minimal as possible and just let them go to town with whatever art materials they've got (while keeping intact the rules about not contaminating the paint jars with other colors, not marking on someone else's work, etc.). Even when we do something like this, which is really more of a "craft," I still like to keep the number of instructions and step-by-step directions and parent work down as far as possible. I don't like children's work that is too crafty or obviously parent-directed--there aren't just a lot of ways to make a Santa out of an upside-down white handprint and some red construction paper and googly eyes, ya know?--but I also would like the children to send some Christmas cards that can be recognized as Christmas cards by anyone, not just her parent who can interpret the scenario under which the smear of orange tempera on a playing card was created.

For a full-on collage window card tutorial you can check out my tute on Crafting a Green World, but it really isn't that hard to figure out: tri-fold card, cut-out window, artful collage across that window--

--and a judicious amount of white glue.

And then, once we've got a few of these under our belts (two for Will and one for Syd is about the limit), plenty of time to make even more cards out of leftover wallpaper scraps, pink cardstock, the hole punch, and an extremely generous amount of white glue to hold it all together.

When Cursive Handwriting Comes to Play

Even before I had Montessori girls, I looooooved the Montessori garage sale that the school holds every spring--in the National Guard Armory, it's so big. At a garage sale hosted by a fancy-pants private school that's at the same time so child-centric and child-led, you can expect to find loads of not just once-expensive snowsuits and excellent books and all the other stuff wealthy parents provide for their kids, but wooden toys and dress-up clothes and well-cared-for board games and puzzles and craft kits and fabulous educational materials, as well.

Last year, among some of my random (and REALLY cheap purchases--another benefit to the sale is that parents work it, and some of them have NO IDEA how to price thing) purchases were a drill-operated lathe and a complete set of large cursive sandpaper letters, mounted nicely on wood. I had figured that I would either end up crafting or decorating with these letters, or that they'd come out to play only much later in my children's lives, after, you know, they both knew their print letters, for instance.

However, Willow found this alphabet during the massive study/studio reorganization and asked that they be put as a choice on the shelves in their bedroom. I complied, and there they sat for an additional long while, but this weekend I guess the urge finally hit (don't you know that feeling?), and Willow suddenly came up with a slew of activities that she wanted to do with the letters.

Since Willow doesn't know her cursive a from her cursive z, Momma got to help, and it was quite fun.

First, Willow wanted to make a "long line," so I gave her the letters, one by one in alphabetical order, showed her how to trace it with her finger (sandpaper letters are big in Montessori, so Will has this concept down cold), had her tell me what sound(s) the letter makes, and then she put it in its place in the line:
There were a few moments of angst when it was discovered that t was missing, but at last it was found, safe and sound, in the car (?).

Then Will wanted to play "games" with the letter line, so while I sat all nice and comfy down past z, I'd tell Willow what letter I wanted her to point to, then release her to run as fast as she could down the line, point to the letter, and run as fast as she could back to me, where I'd catch her:
After a while this transitioned to me spelling out a simple word (bed, say, or cat) and sending her running to point to all the letters in order, then after she ran back to me and I'd caught her she would sound out the word she'd just spelled.

And all I had to do was sit on my butt!

Will's next big plan was to draw all the letters on a really long piece of paper. The really long piece of paper we had (of course!), but I wasn't sure if Willow had yet seen in her classroom how you could do rubbings with the sandpaper letters, so I showed her how, and it was such a big hit, waaaaaay more satisfying than leaf rubbings for little hands, that drawing all the letters was immediately abandoned and instead each letter was traced in its place on the long letter line: Each in a different color, of course:

And after that I foisted off on Matt the next project, which was to write underneath the line, in handwriting "very pretty," the verse "Now I know my ABCs; next time won't you sing with me?".

And then Matt made us popcorn and margaritas (virgin for the littles, saucy for the bigs), and we all got into bed and watched the old-school Doctor Dolittle until half of us fell asleep--Willow and I, unfortunately, which was probably not exactly the half that Matt had planned on when he made me a nice margarita, but what can you do?

Tonight perhaps we'll try an early bedtime for the littles, and THEN margaritas.

Turkey Cards from Monkey Girls

Here's what we did with the hand turkeys: While the girls were at school, I scanned their turkeys, re-scaled them to 4"x5", and printed them in color on plain typing paper. I cut down a piece of 8.5"x11" cardstock to make a card about 5"x7", and glued the turkey prints to the fronts of the cards. They still needed a little something-something, so we used our letter punches to punch the word "TURKEY" on the front of each.

In case, you know, you couldn't tell what you were looking at. Which I admit is a distinct possibility.

We might use this same format for at least a couple of the Christmas cards that we'll be making this week for the Kids Craft Weekly handmade card swap. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to have the girls start making cards before we got our recipients list this morning, but the girls now have until December 1 to make ten cards, so I'll be thinking today about how to set up the activity so that it does NOT resemble a sweatshop.

The girls desperately wanted to give all their cards to friends at school, but I forced them to write out a bare minimum (in our house, that generally equals 2) to actual relatives. Can you tell which relative this one is for?

Okay, if you were up to that challenge, here's a way harder one. Can you tell which relative this card is for?

Happy Thanksgiving, Uncle Chad!