The Littlest Photographer

Guess who found a brand-new camera in her stocking this Christmas?

 
 
 
 
 
 
It's become Sydney's mission in life to document all things "pretty", whether that be a toy dino with snow on its face or a self-portrait plus Gracie in a strangle-hold.

Cameras and kids are the most wonderful combination. I'm loving my introduction to the way that Sydney sees the world.

Snuggly Warm, Snowy Cold Photo Shoot

My house has rotten lighting (I'm house hunting, by the way--know of any good two-story non-ranch houses on around five acres of land, no more than a 20-minute commute from a good graphic design job, for under $200,000?), and so I have to do my product shoot outdoors. It's challenging enough in the summer, when I have to find the perfect spot of indirect lighting, but in the winter, when I have to find that spot on a sunny day...well, the Midwest isn't really famous for that.

I tried to compromise by shooting some indoor shots next to an east-facing window blocked by scrub trees, but combined with a model prone to making goofy faces, I only got a few keepers out of dozens of shots:

 
 
 However, even though it was stinkin' cold so I only got my I Spy quilt done, I did discover that the snow makes an excellent photo backdrop:

 
 It's so hard to put a quilt into one shot, and so I think that this corner-to-corner angle is going to be my new go-to quilt shot:

 And then, of course, there's fringe:

The I Spy quilt is now up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, to be followed by some more one-of-a-kind listings as soon as we get some more snow!

The Dino Name Game

1. I am a big nerd about etymology.

2. I have a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin.

Hopefully, this has made clear to you why I have made my four- and six-year-old children a game based around Greek and Latin word roots.

It's super-fun, I swear.

Will is always fascinated when I translate dinosaur names for her--the names actually make sense!--so I collected the most common Greek and Latin word roots that are used for dinosaur names (ignoring, of course, the other two ways in which dinosaurs are named, which is after people or places), copied them neatly onto word strips, wrote the translations on the back, and then laminated them and cut them out:

I like the table of Greek and Latin dinosaur descriptors, but the most important thing to me was to include all the word roots for the girls' favorite dinosaurs, and the word roots that are the most descriptive and evocative, so I also did a lot of flipping through our dinosaur encyclopedias to pick up ideas.

Now that we have a nice, big stack of descriptors in a drawstring bag (more on that later), the girls enjoy pulling the cards out and using them to construct funny dinosaurs:

Here Willow, who wanted to face the cards so that I could see them, was trying to make "the longest dinosaur name in the world."

Her plateotripteroderm just may win the prize!

My New Kitchen Aid

My mother-in-law, noticing that I cook with the girls nearly every day (and also, likely, noticing that the recipes that I cook with the girls are inevitably shockingly elaborate, outrageously messy, and have had a seriously detrimental effect on the state of my kitchen and my emotional health), took pity on me and bought me a new toy for Christmas:

I have owned my new Kitchenaid mixer for approximately five days now, and so far the girls and I have used it to make vegan strawberry cake, four loaves of bread dough, and the vanilla cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, complete with the vegan "buttercream" frosting, also made with my new Kitchenaid mixer:

Yum:

Yum!

and YUM!!!!!!!

This afternoon, my Kitchenaid and I are going to mix up some meringue, because baked Alaska doesn't just bake itself, you know.

Tiny Little Memorials

Down on my belly in the cold to photograph this interestingly and lovingly decorated grave near where my grandmother lies:

 
Doesn't every cemetery need one fabulous eyesore?

Acrylic Paint and Fabric Paint Duke it Out!!!

Y'all, don't get locked into that whole "only use fabric paint on fabric" business. It's a conspiracy, I tell you, and frankly quite unnecessary.

These past couple of weeks, I've been sewing up a coupla dozen personal peace flags for a long overdue pumpkinbear etsy shop update (I have to take photos outside for them to look at all decent, and in this weather...brrr!), and if I had to use my uber-expensive Jacquard Neopaque fabric paints on every single PEACE, I would be out of business!

That's not to say that you should never use fabric paint on a non-wearable fabric project, or should always use fabric paint on a wearable fabric project...basically, you have to experiment a little, and figure out what paint to use based on the properties of the individual paints.

For instance, acrylic paint dries stiffer than fabric paint--good quality fabric paint shouldn't dry stiff at all. So for a T-shirt, or baby clothes, you def want to use superior-quality fabric paint. But for your jeans, or a hat, or any other article of clothing for which drape isn't important, knock yourself out with acrylics, if you'd like. But if you're painting even a non-wearable fabric project, but you need it to be flexible and have a lot of drape, you probably want to use fabric paint. With my peace flags, the stiffness of the paint doesn't make a difference, so it doesn't matter if I use fabric paint or acrylic.

Coverage does matter, though, and it pretty much depends on the color of the paint, and a bit on the brand, how well a particular paint will cover a particular fabric color. Even with the Jacquard Neopaque fabric paints, which are supposed to be, well, opaque, the yellow needs two coats before the blue fabric print behind it doesn't show through. Same with the green over the silvery-white fabric that I chose. The white, however, gives perfect coverage in one coat, even over the green fabric that I'm using, as do the rest of the darker colors. With the craft acrylics, every color that I've tried needs two coats before it's opaque over a dark print, so if I have to do two coats anyway, I'd rather use the cheaper acrylic paints than the waaaay more expensive fabric paints.

I like to work with what I already own, too, so for me color matters--I'd rather use the perfect color in a more expensive paint that I already own than go shopping for the perfect color in a less expensive paint. For instance, I like the green of the fabric paint much better on this particular fabric, and I thought the red of the acrylic paint gave the best contrast on the trickier-to-match red fabric, so that's what I used:

Of course, you can always purchase textile medium to give acrylic paint the draping properties of fabric paint, but that's just something else to buy.

The Darkness that You Make for Yourself

The time is 11:00 a.m.

SYDNEY: "I want to play with my glowsticks."

ME: "Then you have to go into the bathroom, close the door, and turn out all the lights."

 
 
 
 

It turned out to be a workable solution.

Work in Progress: DANCE

 
 
 
All I need now is to acquire some ribbon someplace or another, and my little dancing girl will have a tidy place to keep her tights, leotard, and ballet shoes.

Bedtime Stories

Everybody gets their own.

Today is Monday

coffee

newspaper

scrambled eggs with spinach and green peppers

Bella Sara web site--approved for now with the understanding that I am NOT purchasing any Bella Sara products. You want some of those magical self-esteem horse trading cards? No problem--go clean the bathroom and I'll give you a buck.

 Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

You Read to Me, I'll Read to You

poetry written from the perspective of a hamster

Moonlight and the Magic Flute

Mother Goose

Eyewitness Skeleton

independent reading--Jane Yolen novel for me, Magic Tree House audiobook for Syd, and some more Bella Sara (from the library--you can still use the code inside to get the magical horseshoes!) for Willow

 Glenn Gould playing Mozard on the record player

Sydney playing Legos on top of the sewing that I'm trying to do

some sewing that Willow is trying to do

 ripping more CDs (my goal is to have a complete mp3 collection of Magic Tree House and Story of the World. I keep the library hopping.)

Go, Diego, Go!

bread, dipping oil, oranges, and a hot dog (made by and for Willow) for lunch

sorting

sliding

 tidying

to the park in the bitter coldness (I'm the only one who's bothered)

home at dusk

reading

onions make you cry

 vegan corned "beef" and cabbage

math (adding up coins! Word problems! Counting!)

tidying

Family Movie=Stomp Live!

sleep

perhaps for me, too, just as soon as I finish that Jane Yolen novel

Homeschool Field Trip: The Fire Station

Our homeschool group has plenty of kids who are the perfect age to enjoy this field trip. Seriously, Sydney and Willow couldn't have been more excited by a field trip to a unicorn farm, or a toy pony factory. When I was a little kid I always seemed to have some sucky thing going on, like pneumonia, or a tonsillectomy, every single time our class took a field trip, so I'd never been to the fire station, either, and when the girls were all, "Do they have real fires there?" "Will we get to use the hose?" "Do they ever take off their fire helmets?", I was all, "I don't know!"

Let's find out, shall we?

We all sat in the firefighter living room while Firefighter Dan talked to us about fire safety:

The girls and I have had our chats about fire safety, sure, but they listened with bated breath as Firefighter Dan coached them in stop, drop, and roll, and not to goof around with matches (thankfully Willow did not volunteer the fact that her occasional evening treat is to light a stick of incense with a cigarette lighter--carefully supervised, of course), etc. All the children thought it was REALLY funny to be quizzed about proper evacuation procedures:

Firefighter Dan: "Do you stop to eat a peanut butter sandwich?"
Children: [insert shouts of laughter] "NO!!!!!"

I learned something new, too: If you're in a building that's on fire, and you can get to a window and open it, but you can't escape out of that window, you should just start throwing stuff out of it. Firefighters walk the perimeter of a building that's on fire, and if they see a bunch of junk out in the yard, then they'll know that there's somebody up above that junk. Another firefighter told the children that if a firefighter is ever in a lot of trouble in the same situation, that firefighter will throw his or her helmet out the window so that the other firefighters know who is trapped and where they are. For some reason, the children all fixated on this piece of information:

Child: "But what if something falls on your head and you don't have your helmet on?"
Firefighter: "It's a risk we have to take if we're in that much trouble, but usually we get down on the floor and cover our head."
Another Child: "What if your helmet lands in the next yard and the other firefighters don't see it?"
Firefighter: "We'd try not to throw it that hard, but the other firefighters look around really well, too, so they could find it."
Another Child: "But what if your helmet got caught in a tree and didn't fall down to the ground?"
Firefighter: "The helmet's heavy, and we'd try not to throw it towards a tree."

There were several more excellent helmet-related questions, but you get the idea.

I was the most excited for the girlies to see the firefighters in their full gear. I've often explained about how loud and smoky and dark a fire would be, and how firefighters wear special clothes to protect their skin and masks to protect their eyes and lungs and that their voices will come from speakers in their masks, and so even though they'll look and sound like monsters they're actually there to rescue you, and you have to run to them if you see them and not hide from them, but it's still something that I've always been nervous about. A few years back a fellow graduate student was a bit incapacitated at the time that his apartment caught fire, and like a child he hid in his closet and was killed there. It just seems like such the instinctive thing to run and hide when there's something scary, especially if there's some strange, faceless giant lumbering about and calling your name in a Darth Vader voice.

These firefighters, of course, were way on top of those concerns. This particular firefighter (Firefighter Jeff? Firefighter Dan?) knelt down at the children's level as he put on all of his gear, telling them why each piece was important as he put it on and continually reminding them that it was just him under all of it, even when it didn't look like him at all:

Even though our tour of the engine bay later on was also very excellent, and even though the girls were thrilled at getting to climb into a real live fire truck, and even though headquarters ran a fire drill for us so that we could hear the alarm in the station and that was also awesome, this photo below, taken after the firefighter invited the children up to examine his gear more closely, remains my favorite moment of our trip:

I don't recall if Willow was specifically invited to knock on this firefighter's head, but I guess that's another way that helmets are useful.

Peanut Butter Sailboat and the Blueberry Girls

The indulgences of children are often the sweetest to satisfy.

Her Bi-Weekly Book Collection

We go to the public library usually twice a week. Before we leave, I ask Willow to sort through her chapter books and stack the ones that she's read by the door. Here's her stack for today, about the same size as usual:

Will does read many books cover to cover in one sitting, but she also has an assortment of half-read books all over the house, picked up and reshelved by any passing parent, and she doesn't seem to mind losing track of and then re-finding and re-finding her place in books, either, so any particular book in the stack may have been read in hours or weeks.

Returning books to the library is generally one of Matt's homeschool chores, as is picking up held items from the library's drive-up window. You can go online and request that any library item be held for you to pick up at the library drive-up, so this is generally how I choose all of our non-fiction and homeschool books, from dinosaurs to Pompeii to how peanut butter is made, as well as related software programs and audiobooks and music CDs and DVDS, as well as my own novels and cookbooks and craft books and parenting books and homeschooling idea books, as well as all of Matt's stuff. Just this morning I taught Willow how to use the online catalogue, too, sooooo.... Yeah, it's Matt's chore.

At the library, Syd picks her own picture books, and she's permitted to choose one DVD, too, and I might check out some of the magazines that I've grabbed to read while the girls play, and Will and I both work to choose her next huge stack of books. She looks through the shelves of first chapter books while I look in the regular juvenile fiction section for longer books. It's a challenge, often, to find regular juvenile fiction that's appropriate for a six-year-old--just because she can read a more sophisticated book doesn't mean that she's interested in (or ready for!) more sophisticated themes. We've had good luck with Nancy Drew so far, and the Black Stallion series, and the Misty of Chincoteague series, and the Little House series, and the Moffetts series, and sometimes the Boxcar Children books, although those get a bit repetitive (the number of times that the children speak the word "boxcar" really gets on my nerves). So far Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, and E.B. White are no-gos. Someday soon, we'll all have the pleasure of their company, I hope.



Right this second, Sydney is already in bed, listening to a Magic Tree House audiobook. It's later than usual, so it sounds like Matt skipped the night-night books and poetry in favor of just getting the kids in bed with their eyes closed, but she and I had an extra-long time this morning with Magic School Bus and That's Good! That's Bad! and Robert Frost and Eyewitness Skeleton, not to mention the Readable Feasts program at the library this evening in which Ms. Janet read books about Alaska to the children and then they all made baked Alaska together, so Syd's happy to simply lie down for a change. As I write this, Matt's telling Willow, for the fifth time, to put down her book and get into bed, and his voice just got lower, which means that firm speaking is afoot.

After the girls are in bed I'll sew for a while (I'd like to get Will's pants patched with their heart appliques tonight, because I know she'd like to wear them to our tour of the fire station tomorrow morning), and then I'll close up shop, turn out the lights in the study, hop into bed, and read for a while.

Runs in the family, this book thing.