My Heart is in Boston Tonight

Let's be there together, shall we?

Bibs for Babies

I am not going to have anymore babies on purpose (knock on wood), so it's a source of sadness to me sometimes that I didn't become the hyper-engaged crafter that I am today until after my second baby was born.

Think of all the blankies that I missed out on sewing for my own babes. The baby gowns! The rompers! The Boppy covers! The cloth stacking rings! The little hats! The diaper covers! The mei tais! All the weensy little things, sewn by me, just for my baby, and I get to put them on her, and look at her all super-cute, and take her picture, because in this fantasy I'm also not half-functioning under a fog of exhaustion.

Suffice to say...

I sort of have a thing for sewing presents for other people's babies. 

A few weeks ago, there was a perfect storm of babies being born. My half-sister had a baby, and a friend here in town had a baby, and a co-worker a couple of states over had a baby.

I got to sew little baby presents in batches! 

It totally beat to hell the sympathy cards that I had to write in batches a couple of months ago.

And what's great for batch sewing for babies?

Bibs, that's what!

I used my old pattern for these T-shirt bibs that I made, gasp!, almost five years ago, to make bibs for all the new babies. I really, really liked the look of the T-shirt bibs, especially the tie-dyed ones, but I'm trying to sew from my stash this year (have I mentioned that the girls and I are undertaking another epic road trip in a couple of months? Hershey World, here we come!), and I have lots of lovely quilting cottons in my stash.

So I ironed interfacing to both pieces of fabric, sewed them and turned them and edge-stitched them--

--stopped to admire them in a can't-stop-beaming-at-them way that totally disturbed poor Matt when he happened to walk by and catch me at it--

--snap set them, monogrammed them, forgot to take pictures of them, and gave them to babies. Two sets were mailed, and one set was given in person, along with that fabric matching game big siblings present that caused me so much grief.

As I was chatting with my friends that day, including the new mom, we were talking about my "baby presents in batches" thing, and I confessed that I actually had yet another long-distance friend who had just had another baby, but they weren't getting another baby present, because they hadn't acknowledged the last one.

"Oh, you're one of THOSE people," the new mom said, probably half-operating under her own fog of exhaustion and contemplating a future of having to snap a bib around the neck of the baby currently at her breast and show it to me as yet another chore to complete before she could catch her entire hour in a row of sleep that night.

I said, "OH yeah, I'm one of those people! The only reason on this Earth why someone would make someone else's baby a gift by hand is that they want to see the damn baby WITH their gift. The whole time they're knitting a little baby hat or sewing a blankie or whatever, they're thinking, 'That little baby is going to look so cute in this hat/blankie/onesie whatever! I can't wait to see it!' So yeah, if the person that you made a baby gift for receives the gift, throws it in the baby's dresser, and gets on with their life, gift unacknowledged, it kind of kills the point of making them another baby gift. Their new kid needs some bibs? They can go to Wal-mart--they don't have to personally thank the sweat shop workers there."

And that's how I probably took the flavor out of one new mom's zest for receiving gifts for all her current and future children. Just please remember that I never have claimed to be one of those good person-type thingies. 

I just like making stuff for babies.

Memory Work is WORK!

Memory work is useful, yes, but easy it is absolutely NOT! As I've added more memory work to our weekly schedule, I've found that it's really necessary to keep finding different ways to review the same material every day. Too many flashcards, and too much straight copywork, and the kiddos' brains just tune out. They'll be able to quickly give the correct response in that same format, but ask them the same question in a different way, and they suddenly can't remember a single Latin word that they've been reviewing daily for a month, sigh.

Therefore, mostly for my own reference, but for yours, too, if you care about such things, I've compiled below my list of all the varied ways that I can think of to review memory work, everything from spelling words to math facts, timeline dates to state capitals, poetry to sight words, vocabulary to Latin translations...you get the idea:

Copy in alphabetical order. This works for spelling/vocabulary words and the kids' Latin words--it's regular old copywork, but you have to use your brain a bit more, and it makes sure that you're not studying the words in the same order every time.

Write it on the window with dry erase markers or the sidewalk with chalk. The kiddos ALWAYS like to do this, but it does take a ton of time, since if you've given them dry erase markers or chalk and fun things to draw on, you've obviously got to let them draw:

Speed race! This would give Sydney a heart attack, but it's been working really well with Willow and multiplication. Simply memorizing her multiplication table is a fail, because she can calculate so quickly that she can work any fact out in her head in a few seconds, and then you're left wondering, "Is she trying to remember, or counting by eights in her head?". I've been using these multiplication matching puzzles, however, timing Willow as she races to complete them, and encouraging her to beat the previous day's time. If it looks like she's starting to memorize the positions of the answers as well as the answers, I skip to different tables for a few days, and then go back to the earlier ones for a fresh look and a review.

Songs. Will is our star at memorizing facts through song (her recitation of all the countries of Africa still gives me pridey feelings inside), but Syd is quickly catching her up, with her love of the Song School Latin CD. It takes a lot of curating, though, because many educational songs are crap. I use my free Spotify app to search for and then stream songs for just about every subject--they're not all for memorizing, of course (the girls always want to listen to the state song of whatever state they're studying, for instance), but you'd be surprised how happily you can bop along to the multiplication table when it's sung by a good voice to a catchy tune. Our favorite, by FAR, is Victor Johnson's Multiplication and Skip Counting Songs, although there's also a super annoying song ("The Pi Song," by Bryant Oden) that I'm using to memorize pi:

"They said 'Would you like some pi?' I said, 'Yes, I would!' I forgot they majored in math. I would undo it if I could! They said, '3.1415926535897932384626433.'" Yep, that's from memory! Don't all congratulate me at once.

DIY Dry Erase. The girls actually DON'T like this too much, because it takes a lot more elbow grease to erase than a conventional dry erase board, but for things like parts labeling or their spelling words, I like to laminate the document to use as a dry erase:

I've also heard that page protectors and CD cases work well as dry erase boards, but I haven't tried them yet. One more thing for my to-do list!

Tape yourself. The girls love doing this for poetry and spelling words. Not only does the taping require a lot of thoughtful interaction with their memory work, but it also really encourages repetition--I think they just like to listen to themselves! I let them record these on my ipod, which they're allowed to use, too--

--but if a certain little someone receives an ipod touch for her birthday (assuming that Craigslist/local pawn shops cooperate), then they can start recording on that, instead. 

DIY flash cards. They like their flash cards better if they help me make them. This works especially well for Latin, since we use these coloring pages that correspond to all the vocabulary in Song School Latin. I print them four to a page, the girls color them, then (sloppily) cut them out and (even more sloppily) laminate them, all by themselves. Big fun, and impossible for them to say that they hate later on.

So that's what I've got so far. I need WAY more ideas, though! I'd like to have twenty or so possibilities, to support a full month of memory work without repetition. But I also need ideas that don't require a ton of prep work--I do NOT want to be creating a Montessori-style three-part card for every subject every week, for instance--or use a ton of expensive or disposable materials. 

Help?

Finally, the Sun!

And it's about time! In the 13 years that I've lived in Indiana, this is the latest spring that I've ever experienced.

Clearly, then, in the 13 years that I've lived in Indiana, this is the spring that I've been cherishing the most. On the first really nice day of spring, just a handful of days ago, we meandered over to the park, as we often do, sleepwalking almost in our routine (as we perhaps often do), and it wasn't until we were there, under an actual SUN and an actual BLUE SKY, that we all three sort of stopped, came to ourselves, and started exclaiming "It's a really nice day today!"

You'd think that these children had never seen chalk before, as the job of making a sidewalk chalk fashion show runway quickly turned to making everything else in their imaginations:

It's so early in the season that I don't even have sidewalk chalk yet!

After that, there was a lot more running around like maniacs--

--plenty of rubbernecking of a random family (mom, dad, four-ish small kids) who were playing the most aggressive game of soccer that I have ever seen adults and children play together (Calling a four-year-old a cheater because he touched the ball with his hand? Nice job, Dad!), and, yes, plenty of just plain basking:

Now that it's actually sunny out, I've got to stop putting them facing the sun in order to take their pictures, poor kid!

2013 Science Fair

While one girl and her Momma have been invested in the fashion show of late, the other girl and her Dadda have been just as busy.

I was sad to see that this year's homeschool Science Fair overlapped with one of our Trashion/Refashion Show rehearsals, but such is life--one must choose one's commitments, and then commit to one's choices. However, having only one kid in the Science Fair this year made this year's Science Fair a fine project for just that kid and her Dadda to do together. I left it all to them--I incorporated some time for Willow to work on her project during our school days, and I helped her write a reference guide, and she dictated her report to me, and I helped her rehearse her presentation, but she and Matt did all the hands-on dirty work, which included making several paper airplanes, flying each of them 20 times and measuring each flight, averaging and line graphing all the flights, and making some pretty kick-ass graphics to represent the data. It's good to have a graphic designer for a father!

Here's Will rehearsing her presentation, the day of the Science Fair:


She was really proud of her project (as she should be!), and pretty excited to share it--

--and, okay, maybe a little nervous, too--

--at least until she's distracted by Matt:

We call this the Willow Death Glare. We are often its victims.

 I wish I could show you Willow's actual presentation, which she did an amazing job at, so comfortable and confident and focused in front of all those eyes, but there are a bunch of other kids in it. It's super-cute watching her coach all the kids through the making of the Dynamic Dart--I wasn't sure how this part would go, since I know from experience that students will get everything wrong that it's possible to get wrong when following instruction, with seemingly every student doing something uniquely incorrect all at the same time. And yep, that's how it went here, but Willow went around and helped kids who got stuck, and a couple of parents helped out, and in the end, everyone had their very own Dynamic Dart.

Fortunately, the other side of the conference room was free--a perfect place, really, for the flying of paper airplanes:

Across town, Syd and I finished our rehearsal, ran to the car, sped over to the library, screeched into a parking spot, and galloped inside, just missing the last presentation, but just in time for the socialization. Homeschoolers are a diverse bunch, and although we see friends from this group a few times a week, there are other friends that we only see at these types of events, so there's a lot of playing to get done in a short amount of time.

And, of course, a lot of smiles to let out:

What can I say? Science makes us happy!

Barbie Fashion Show

We are deep into fashion show season here! Syd is practicing her runway walk daily, and spending much of the rest of her days thinking, dreaming about, talking about, and playing fashion show.

On our free day from school last week, I was spending the afternoon completing some orders from my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and trying really hard to ignore all screams, thumps, and crashes from the other room, but I could not ignore my kiddo when she came in to theatrically announce that it was time for the Barbie fashion show in the next room.

A Barbie fashion show?!? Count me IN!

So I turned off the heat gun, laid a cloth over the beeswax (I've learned through experience that a cat will lie on top of rolled beeswax, and that rolled beeswax that a cat has lain on top of will never again be suitable for sale), and followed Syd out to the living room, where my clever girl had spent HER afternoon creating garments for each of her hand-me-down Barbies, and using our colored masking tape to tape a fashion show runway onto the floor.

Syd asked me to find "thumpy music" for the show, so I turned on the Club/House radio station on Spotify, and off we went!


Before I go on, I just have to ask you: you're not sitting there snarking on my house, are you? It's fine if you are, because I am not the person who stages my shots, or even runs around cleaning like crazy when someone's about to come over. Okay, I WILL clean the bathroom sink and put out a fresh hand towel, but I probably won't vacuum or clear off the table. So yes, the room that you can see through the doorway is messy, and the games don't fit on those built-in shelves, and the hallway has a kid-painted rainbow right in the middle of it, and I didn't vacuum the carpet, and I never learned that trick of how to hide a cord so that it doesn't hang in the middle of everything, and man, do our hardwood floors look run-down!

Anyway, back to the story: I love Sydney's Barbie fashion show, because you can really see how much of the process she's learned from her years of experience as a Trashion/Refashion Show designer/model. She taped her models' marks, and she walks them and poses them and walks them again, and they take care to show the entire outfit to both sides of the audience, and they certainly look like they're having fun, don't they?

But of course, the most important aspect of the model's performance is the garment, and I really, REALLY love how Sydney created each model's outfit, some from our stash of vintage Barbie clothes, but most assembled from my scrap fabric bin:

And speaking of Ken, Sydney has a further video starring him. She produced, directed, and served as costume designer. I filmed exactly as she dictated:


Hopefully we won't have anything like THAT at the fashion show!

Easter 2013

the haul

the hunt

and afterwards, the happy girls full of chocolate, playing Professor Noggin with their parents

the perfect holiday, yes?

Stamp Collectors

Warning: If you're an avid stamp collector, and you enjoy the sight of a well-maintained postage stamp collection, then run. Run away, and don't look back!

As a teenager, I enjoyed making myself a little stamp collection. It turns out that my Mamma had kept every greeting card and letter that she'd ever been mailed, and in return for sorting out all those sent by now-divorced former relatives, I clipped decades' worth of postage stamps, carefully soaked them away from their envelope paper, moistened hinges, and mounted them in a stamp album.

Fast-forward a few decades of my own time. I still have my stamp album, I still like postage stamps a lot, and yes, now that I rarely get real mail anymore, I have been buying the odd set of postage stamps, generally themed collections from Western Mountain Stamp and Coin (now defunct, so lmk if you know of anything similar, because I LOVED those themed sets!). I thought that the kids might like stamp collecting, too, on account of it's awesome, so to start them off I gave them some stamp sets (I've bought WMSC's dinosaur set, horse set, and cat set, and I'm pretty sure that I will soon own a Disney set and a U.S. set or two), a little journal each, and a glue stick.

My theory was that the children would neatly mount each stamp, nice and orderly and organized, into their stamp books using the glue stick (which can be soaked away later when they're ready for big kid stamp albums). Perhaps they'd want to tidily label each stamp! Perhaps they'd want to research the country of origin of each stamp! Perhaps they'd beg me to take them to stamp collectors' meetings and expos where they could spend their allowances on rare stamps!

As a good parent, I'd attend stamp collectors' meetings and expos with my children. That's just what a good parent DOES, don't you know?

Well...my fantasy isn't *exactly how the kids use their stamps and beginner stamp albums:

They do love sorting through their stamp collection, just as I do.

 

So yes, the albums are messy enough to make a "real" stamp collector gasp, but my kids LOVE them. And if they're going to sit with their stamps, happy as clams, and make the messiest stamp albums ever known, then I'm going to be happy, too.

Because I look at them that happy, sorting through stamps and gluing them untidily in their little books, and I see stamp collectors, just like I'd hoped they would be.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Embroidery Spools and Satire

an April Fool's Day spoof about gardening Monsanto-style

and a tutorial to make upcycled cardboard embroidery floss spools

This was one of my favorite weeks writing for CAGW. The DIY embroidery floss spools tutorial was quick to make and easy to write up, and I really, really like how the project turned out, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed writing satire half my life ago, when I wrote for my university's student newspaper (and ooh, did I burn it up! I used to get SO many letters from people offended by what I had to say! My editor was THRILLED with me).

I had no idea what I was going to do with myself back then. I was an English major because I liked to read. I held down two different writing jobs (one at the student newspaper, and one at the alumni magazine--wasn't I cute?), but I didn't do much great writing at either of them because I was too busy with the too many credit hours that I took each semester, because I also liked to study.

I graduated and I panicked. Just as I predicted in that TCU Magazine article that I linked to just now, I internalized my parents' work ethic to such a degree that I completely freaked out and began desperately, painfully searching for a job, any job. And oh, the jobs that English majors are qualified for are so, so lame! Because I was a terrible interviewer, I thankfully missed out on several miserable-sounding technical writing jobs. Unfortunately, I then read a book on interviewing, nailed my next interview, and accepted what was probably the stupidest glorified secretary/technical writer job for an organization that was basically an auto workers' lobby, working for the meanest, craziest, most bigoted boss who had ever started as a secretary herself and then married the company president. She spent her days talking to her friends on the phone, wandering off to the house that she was having built in one of those fancy gated communities with her new husband's big money, coming back to interrupt my work by telling me all about the "queers" who lived in her neighborhood (ooh, I hated her!), and blaming me for mistakes she'd made in her work by insisting that the work was really MY work that she'd given me clear instructions on how to complete.

One day, eleven months in, after I was way beyond my breaking point, I overheard her on the phone consoling her best friend, who had just lost her job. Right that second I wrote my just-in-case letter of resignation, and two days later I was able to hand it to her before she could finish firing me for the list of totally made-up wrongs that she had probably spent the last two days inventing. Her best friend was settled in my vacated job before the month was out.

I was so much happier after that, poor and adrift as I was. I started substitute teaching in the Ft. Worth school system, which was way challenging enough to keep me interested (and was WAY eye-opening, and highly influenced how I educate my children). Out of the blue, a former professor offered me a scholarship to take a few graduate-level classes at my old university, and these had me studying again, happy as a clam. Another professor suggested that, if I liked studying so much, I should apply to grad school. More studying?!? Sign me up!

Of course, an aimless college graduate who spent a couple of years outside of academics working random jobs does not make for the strongest grad school candidate. Only one graduate school accepted me, and so that was where I went. As soon as Matt graduated from our university one semester later, he joined me here, and began his own desperate job search. After a while, we decided that since we were living together, we might as well be married. After a longer while, we decided that since we were married, we might as well have a baby. We liked that first baby so much, we decided to have another. I liked them both so much that I didn't study as much as I should for my PhD exam, and so I failed it (it helped that my exam committee had written me off, too, apparently, and were the picture of unsupportive. I'm not famous as one who struggles through the odds and triumphs, it would seem). Matt and I figured that if I didn't have a PhD to study for, I could do my best work being a stay-at-home mom. My kids thrived so much with me as a stay-at-home mom, that we decided we'd better homeschool them. They thrived so much homeschooling, that we decided that we'd better keep it up.

And that's the story so far!

Easter Egg Science: Homemade Natural Dyes

I wanted to play with homemade natural egg dyes this Easter, but I didn't want to have to buy the things that I don't happen to have in my pantry right now--red onions, tumeric, blueberries, carrot tops, goldenrod... basically anything else that natural egg dye recipes typically call for.

Instead, the kiddos and I pulled pretty much all of the random spices and such out of the pantry and used what we had on hand to craft up an experimental natural egg dyes station.

Each kid wrote the name of a spice that she wanted to try on a cup--

--then added to that cup two tablespoons of that spice, one teaspoon of vinegar, and one hard-boiled egg:

Later, I came by and added two cups of boiling water--

--and then I copied the label of each cup into one of our school notebooks and had each kid make predictions about the end color of the egg.

The kiddos had a LOT of fun setting up each cup:

Although it didn't take long for my younger kid, who loves this sort of play, to decide that she'd rather mix up her own egg dye concoctions:

green tea, paprika, coriander, and who knows what else?

About an hour was all I felt comfortable leaving the cups out at room temperature (we ALWAYS eat our Easter eggs!)--

--but it was actually pretty cool during that time to watch how many of the spices, and not just the teas, weirdly expanded due to being saturated. 

I put all the cups in the refrigerator on a low shelf so that the kids could check out the progress of their experiment whenever they wanted, and left them to steep for 24 hours. 

The next day, I brought the cups back out and lined them up again on the table, with towels in front of them, and had the kiddos decant their eggs.

I love these two photos, because my younger kid, who for some reason stated that she did NOT want to participate and did NOT want to see what the eggs looked like and did NOT care...clearly is completely engaged in watching my older kiddo do it:

The color was very faint on nearly all of the eggs, which I'd expected, frankly, from just pulling random ingredients out of the cupboard, but anything at all noticeable was looked upon as a raging success by the kids, and in a couple of cases--

--and--

--the results were actually fairly vibrant.

Next year, I think that I definitely WILL make sure to stock the pantry with red onions and blueberries and turmeric and goldenrod beforehand, so that we're ensured many more satisfying results.

There's a lot to be said, though, for my younger kid finishing off the rest of the expired curry in making her concoctions. That's like multi-tasking in this house!

P.S. Want to follow along with even more of our handmade, homeschooling fun? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!