Handy Matt

Attention, cable TV viewers everywhere! The family and I will soon be appearing on a public access channel near you!

This morning my old friend Christina, one of the friendly neighborhood children's librarians over at the Monroe County Public Library, had us helping to film an informercial about early literacy. I got to be a talking head going on about why I take my girls to storytime and how exposure to books benefits them (being pedagogical helps when being interviewed, although the cameraman at one point did ask the boom operator to move the mike further away from me...ahem. I'm used to projecting to a classroom, people!), and then we all participated in some shots for the "B-roll" to go over disembodied voice footage. Matt read a book to Sydney, Will flipped through some books independently, Syd played with a workbench in the playroom, and Christina forced us to all hold musical instruments and sing together as a family because she needed that particular activity for a shot. Knowing that the footage of us would be soundless (um, right?), I belted out this particular Kimya Dawson household favorite:

After that and bicycling all over town, I retired to finish my slog through my freshman comp student papers, and Handy Matt built a dress-up area in the girls' room, with a rod for hanging dress-up outfits, a big mirror for showing off in front of (to be fronted by a ballet barre at some point in the future), some bins and baskets underneath the hanging stuff for other stuff, and plans for hooks for jewelry.

The man can do anything, right? (...except help the Momma put some clothes on the kids and pose like normal people for a family portrait!)

The idea and basic arrangement of this dress-up area is taken from my favorite blogger, SouleMama, and her awesome book,
I find her really inspirational, y'all.

Festivities, Somewhat

There was a paradeand a whack-o-lanternand trick-or-treatingand tree climbingand more tree climbingand just general awesomeness

and for me, 46 papers to grade, many of which are not at all awesome by any stretch of the imagination.

Here's a little thing I look forward to every weekend, however: the Dover Sampler. I don't remember how long ago I signed up for this, but every Saturday morning in my email in-box I receive a secret link to a site with free pages from Dover books--mostly coloring book pages, which the girls enjoy immensely, but sometimes simple mazes or puzzles or activity pages. Some recent favorites were pages from a birds of America coloring book, a butterfly alphabet coloring book, a famous ballets coloring book, and an activity page on learning to tell time.

To show you how additionally cheap/awesome I am, I'll tell you that whenever one of my print cartridges is almost out of ink, I set it aside and put it in just to print out coloring pages and cutting templates--the kids don't care if their free sample Cats of Siam page is inked in black or pink, don't you know.

Another way in which I'm cheap/awesome? I've never bought my children a coloring book, much less a Dover one.

P.S. Check out my review of earth-friendly children's books over at Eco Child's Play and my tutorial for sewing appliques onto denim buntings over at Crafting a Green World.

Illness and Ornaments and Perhaps a Psychotic Break

One little girl has been sick, sick, sick lately. Therefore, two little girls have been doing this----all day for two days. One little girl has a high fever. Two little girls have been constantly in demand of snacks and juice, almost as constantly spilling them all over MY nice big bed. One little girl finds herself unable to nap restfully or sleep comfortably at night. Two little girls have been bogarting MY computer to watch PBS kids' shows on Netflix's Watch Instant feature. One little girl is cranky and uncomfortable. Two little girls have been whining and fighting with each other. One little girl just wants to nurse all the time. One Momma is going nuts, showerless and nursed out and with a headache from all the noise and tired of cartoons and just a little nauseous from comforting herself by eating almost all the Halloween candy in the house.

So for lack of anything productive to do while sitting in bed with two little girls and watching some Land Before Time movie for the twentieth time IN A ROW, I made even more fiddly little paper Halloween crafts--apparently my "Make Halloween decorations" assignment on my To Do List will not be marked off until November 1.

I made a cutie little 3-D Jack-o-Lantern ornament out of cardstock: This guy is from the most awesomest site in the known universe if you happen to like fiddly little fold-and-cut-paper crafts: The Japanese Paper Museum.

Yep, it's mostly in Japanese. Just click on stuff. Here's the Jack-o-Lantern; here's a cityscape with 3-D paper vehicles and people and road signs that you can cut out and fold and glue together; here are a whole bunch of paper dollhouse rooms and shops that you can make, including this Christmas scene; here are a bunch of animals, including (the awesomeness!) a model skeleton of a T. Rex; and here's sushi!

I had to have my graphic designer husband tell me how to cut and fold together the Jack-o-Lantern, but he claimed (of course) that the instructional illustrations were quite straightforward, and truly, I'm not terribly spacially inclined (although the last couple of years of crafting as a hobby have improved this part of my brain tremendously, I can tell). I saved nearly all these paper patterns to try later, so if you try a different one, tell me how it goes.

I also, in a desperately and almost entirely unsuccessful attempt to divert the girlies away from TV towards other quiet activities, made this garland from Paper Crave. The artist has a black-inked one, but I printed out the outline templates and wheedled Willow into coloring them in for me:
I just really like the style of these--not cutesie, but not gruesome. I also saved the sheet of mini-templates to perhaps use for stickers or magnets, and the digital scrapbook paper because I very occasionally do some scrapbooking.

Ooh, Matt's home. Perhaps I can bribe him into luring the kids away from TV for a couple of books while I take a shower!

P.S. I have a tutorial up for these matching games that I make for the girls over at Eco Child's Play.

Parents' Night is Alright

I cancelled my office hours last night so that I could attend Parents' Night at Will's Montessori. Sure, my students have a big project coming up, but Parents' Night is the kind of event that you ignore labor pains and a ruptured appendix to attend. It's one of the very few times--Open House, two Parents' Nights, two parent/teacher conferences, the Halloween party, and your kid's birthday party--that you, as a parent, are allowed past the two-way mirror and into your kid's actual classroom. Mind you, I'm a firm believer that letting parents tromp all through the Montessori classroom with their big feet and loud voices, trying to "engage" kids or just whatever, would totally ruin the busy little elf dynamic these kids have, happily going from work to work, but I'm still as eager as the next mom to get on in there and get my hands on all the stuff!

So on Parents' Night, your kid has a 45-minute work period (as opposed to the ordinary 2-ish hours) in which to show you their favorite works, and then we circle up (or, as the teacher says, "form the ellipse") and do some singing.

This is chalk work. It's a free-draw with little artist's chalks on paper, and Will says, "Momma, this is my most favorite work!"We spent a long time on this one--I'm all, "Ooh, an art project!" You choose an animal silhouette to stencil with your choice of colored pencil onto a little piece of paper, and you can color your animal. Then you look for the card that has your animal on it, and you copy the name of that animal, written in lower-case letters, onto your paper. When you have several animals done, you can put a piece of wallpaper sample on top, staple them all into a book, and stamp the date on the back.I kept spreading all my stuff all over the table, and Will kept cleaning up after me, gently insisting, "It's important to keep a clear work area, Momma." Huh.

All the materials needed for your work are stored together on a tray, which you put back on the shelf where it goes.
In this numbers work, which is done on the floor and requires the laying out of a work mat, you put the big wooden numbers in order, then put the felt numbers on top of the wooden numbers, then arrange the appropriate number of wooden blocks in front of each number. As soon as Will and Syd had finished laying down the last wooden block, I started to say, "Wow, that's--", but Will was already starting to put everything away again.
This is a seasonal work, in which you basically arrange everything in numerical order again and lay out the appropriate number labels.This is the counting penguins work. There are a lot of them, and the number changes slightly every day--Willow claims this is due to magic.This is the handwriting work, done on a little desk that you can get from under a shelf and put on the carpet instead of a work mat. This work, the stencils work, and the chalk work are three that Willow brings home to us almost every day.

Then the teacher rang the bell for clean-up time and played classical music at us until we'd finished and circled up on the ellipse. We sang the community song, which requires hand-holding, and then we played the "Little Bird" game. Each age group had a turn, so first the kindergartners stood up in a circle, held hands, and raised their hands high to be the windows. Then, while the teacher and I lustily sang (I have this sort of savant-thing in that I know every song, ever) "Little bird, little bird, come through my window," etc., the middle groupers, who were the birds, ran in and out of the circle. Ultimate joy ensued.

The school that I went to as a kid, it sucked.

P.S. I have a tutorial for my denim buntings up on Crafting a Green World today.

Zebrafied

October 1

 ME: What do you want to dress as for Halloween? 

WILL: A round cracker. 

October 3

 ME: Let's go to the Recycling Center and get some cardboard for your cracker costume. 

WILL: I changed my mind--now I want to be a kitten stuck up a tree. 

October 7

 ME: Do you still want to dress as a kitten stuck up a tree? 

WILL: Yes. 

October 10

 ME: Do you still want to be a kitten stuck up a tree? 

WILL: Yes! 

October 15

 ME: What do you want to be for Halloween again? 

WILL: A kitten stuck up a tree. 

October 20

 ME: Should we make your tree branches out of real sticks or PVC pipe? 

WILL: I don't want to be a kitten anymore; I want to be a duck-billed dinosaur. 

October 25

 ME: Come try on this romper--it's going to be your duckbilled dinosaur body. 

WILL: I changed my mind--I really, really, really, really want to be a rainbow pony! 

October 27

 ME: Come look in your horses encyclopedia and show me kind of what your rainbow pony should be shaped like. 

WILL (flipping through book): No, I want to be a zebra! A zebra! Zebraaaaaaa! 

My only solution? Sit right down in the midst of the mess and chaos of our Monday morning and spend five hours making this zebra costume before the kid can change her mind and want to be something else!The best part for me? This is all stash! I used a well-fitting fleece romper of Will's as a template to create a new romper pattern with this black-and-white stretch jersey that a friend gave me a while ago. The zipper is from some I bought at a garage sale for about a nickel a piece this summer. 

I've actually never put together a piece of clothing like this before, so the structuring required lots of deep thinking and there are a few wonky parts, but who cares about those, right? The tail has some black fleece from my scrap bin--I really wanted to sew on a button, like on Eeyore's tail, but alas! my button stash is very thin these days. Some days I wish a big jar of buttons would just fall into my lap--that's a very boring wish, isn't it?

The zebra's mane is cut from a boa that lives in the kids' dress-up bin; unfortunately, it doesn't sit very straight when the hood is being worn, but whatever.

 

And for the ears, I used some pink acrylic felt (made out of recycled plastic bottles!) from the approximately one thousand yards I bought when it was on major sale at Joann's a few weeks ago. I think I'm going to use it again in another little birthday present this week...

Fortunately, Syd, being two, knows her own mind better than Will knows hers--Syd has wanted to be a lion from day one, and is perfectly happy with the lion costume that lives in the dress-up bin. 

Next year, though, I know: I'll keep asking about Halloween costumes until a kid mentions one I think I know how to make, and then I'll make it right that very freakin' minute! 

Sunday is our Day of Slog

We did basically zero fun stuff today. I folded and put away about a gazillion pounds of this----while finishing up Joan of Arcadia Season 2 on DVD (Adam Rove, to think how much I loved you, and you are awful! An awful person!); I washed another gazillion pounds of this----while making beer bread savory muffins with dill and two cheeses with the baby----(along with the dinner I cooked out of cabbage, potato, onion and nutritional yeast, it was delicious--when I do have to cook, I tend to just throw cheese or veganaise or nutritional yeast at my food until it tastes good); and Matt, much more slowly than I think he needed to, built----the most awesomest bookshelves in the known universe:

Cause it's not how much stuff you have that's important, it's just having a place to put it.

Will, as seems inevitable based on how she's standing right at her father's feet and staring straight up at him while he drills heavy metal stuff to the wall, eventually got her face busted on a metal railing; it's been so long since a kid has busted her face at home that I think they both forgot that Momma gives out popsicles for face-busting (juice frozen into a mold--ices the wound, provides counter-pressure, and they think they're getting a treat so they stop screaming). Sydney walked around for the rest of the afternoon saying, "I got ouchie, too. I need 'sicle." I'm all, "Show me the blood, kid. Show me the blood."

Adventures of the Green Goth

I went and did it! I made a Papel Picado banner consisting solely of skulls, using the templates from my newest secret girlfriend, The Toymaker. I upcycled pages for this banner from an old and really boring encyclopedia--I first tried out using glossy magazine pages, but they were pretty slippery and I dislike fiddly activities.

And then? And then I hung my brand-new skulls banner in the master bedroom, right above our bed. Totally not weird, right?

Speaking of fiddly activities...I also spent two hours at Parents' Workday at Will's school today writing up a very detailed Collection Development Policy for the Parents' Library. Don't even get started on the fact that the Parents' Library has about 15 books in it, total. I have dreams, people.

P.S. Check out my post about The Toymaker's Papel Picado (I know, that makes three posts about this! But she's my secret girlfriend!) over at Crafting a Green World.

Crafty Little Kids' Books

While my little book girls busily defoliate the library shelves----I have this habit of looking for crafty children's books. Here's what I found this morning:

• 
  Masquerading as a warm little tale of a pioneer family, this book is actually totally creepy. The mom and the kids sew and make bean stew all day, and while the mom sews on her schoolhouse block quilt, the kids reminisce about the fire that nearly killed them all two years ago, and while one kid sews on her bear paw quilt, they all reminisce about the time Paw nearly got et by a bear. Fun.
• 
  I love this book. Swain presents four different pieces of art, and asks these imaginative little questions and draws these engaging full-page pictures about each one.
• 
  While my girlies aren't old enough for the concept behind this book, as a quilter I'm fascinated by how American slaves used symbology in their patchwork quilts. This story follows the path of a little girl who uses her mother's quilt as a map as she and her father escape to freedom in Canada. Nothing scary actually happens on the pages, so you'd also be able to ad-lib the words and just talk about the quilt blocks and the people who used them if you chose.
• 
  Another bittersweet story about a slave, this is a fictional account of the childhood of Marietta Tintoretto in Renaissance Venice. The illustrations are lifelike and beautiful, and it's an accurate slice of life picture of the Renaissance, although you'd have to also explain the concept of historical fiction here if you were homeschooling with this, say.
• 
  Okay, this is literature by no means, but it has sock monkeys! Real sock monkeys! And they're all dressed up and dancing and stuff!

I totally need to make some sock monkeys.

Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper

After an excitement-filled morning watching Sydney repeatedly hang----and then drop to her doom----over and over and OVER again, in the afternoon we chilled down in the playroom.

The girls busied themselves industriously----if by industrious you mean that they tore up a bunch of my scrapbook paper and then drew on it and then taped it to the wall with the carpet tape that Matt was supposed to use to tape down the flooring four MONTHS ago and then fought over the same square inch of a six-foot-long roll of butcher paper.

The girls wanted me to hang with them, so instead of washing dishes or folding laundry or blogging for bucks I took some scrapbook paper and the Halloween Papel Picado paper bunting templates (a free download from The Toymaker )and created this: I didn't realize how much I would love these paper buntings until I started making them. I mean, seriously, look how awesome:

I like how the scrapbook paper doesn't necessarily match the overt theme, and since Will now wants another bunting just for her room, I think I'm going to try making a couple of more buntings from recycled materials--magazines, old book pages, newspaper, etc.

The downloadable templates for this bunting also include a cat and an owl, but I thought I might save those for a different activity. In upcoming years it would certainly be interesting to explore the Papel Picado with the girls as well as other aspects of the Day of the Dead, but for this year we're mostly exploring Halloween as a celebration of autumn. Why, then, you may ask, did I put skulls in our bunting?

Well, as Willow would explain to you, "Momma just likes skulls." What can I say--I'm an existentialist.

Tattoo My Babies Like I Still Live in Arkansas

It's not even two o'clock pm, yet, and the girls and I have done so many prosaic things already:

We frolicked outdoors in the autumn chill.

We had a lovely outdoor picnic lunch, during which Sydney, who just yesterday had to have her entire lunch removed from the table until she agreed to try her slice of dried peach (Mean Momma Rule #487: You must taste--as in put in your mouth, not necessarily swallow--every single item of food on your plate. If you refuse--goodbye, plate. See you next meal!), ate all the rest of the entire bag of dried peaches.

We played on the playground, and the Willow learned a new trick:

And we did it all while tattooed up like gangstas:

For a while, I've been wanting a set of these Satetytats. It's a cool idea--when you go somewhere crowded, stick a temporary tattoo on your kid that reads "If I'm lost, call _____". I almost bought some, and then I thought, "Temporary tattoos, huh? I wonder if one can make their own temporary tattoos..."

Turns out that you can. You can buy temporary tattoo paper that can be fed through your home printer. The tattoos don't look quite the same as commercial temporary tattoos, because whereas commercial tats actually use an ink that sort of dyes your skin, these tats embed your printer ink in a medical-grade adhesive that then sticks to your skin. Our tattoos have a shiny rather than a matte finish, for instance, they tend to wrinkle a little, and they're not as durable, being designed to come off with one wash. Awesome, however, they still are.

I meant to just print off a sheet of the "If I'm Lost" tattooes, but then I got all caught up in the possibilities. Transformers tattoos for Matt!

Tats made from scans of some of the girls' favorite picture books!From my digital collection of artwork that depicts breastfeeding!WordArt of the girls' names, and some of their own original artwork!Buffy the Vampire Slayer tats, and tats from my own original photography!Oh, and the tattoos with my cell number in case the girls get lost in a crowd:Gangsta, right?

Hit the Big-Time

I sort of get paid for writing, now.

My newest gig is over at Green Options, a blogging community devoted to sustainable living. The blogs located under Green Options are each themed, and the topics range from politics to the arts to business and technology. I write under the Crafting a Green World and the Eco Child's Play blogs, and you'll be able to find me over there in each blog three or four times a week, earning some extra chump change and spewing my ever-ready opinions out to an even bigger audience--you probably didn't think I had even more opinions than the ones I unburden myself of right here, did you? Well, I do.

My first post? A manifesto, of course. And then I go off about zoos.

And what have my kids been doing while I've been posting on THREE blogs, and grading papers, and meeting with students, and washing the entire contents of our house in the sanitary cycle of the washing machine in panicked reaction to Will's pinworm infestation? Why, playing crazy games with numbers, of course!

During the Great Study Cleaning, the girls got ahold of some vintage Bingo cards I'd been saving for...something, and, always the ones with the awesome ideas, Willow cut the cards up into their individual numbers and the kiddos thought that this was just pretty awesome.

When I saw them playing so happily together with such an obvious learning tool, I tried to elbow my way on into their game with a little lesson on how to line them up in order from smallest to largest, but that lesson sucked, and it's so much better when you're just faced with a line of obscurely ordered items and you get to figure out the complicated pattern behind them for yourself:

Go see my big-bucks blog! See if you can figure out what word the Eco Child's Play editor had to correct my spelling of! See then if you can figure out exactly how many post-graduate degrees (hint: more than one) I have and I still misspell that word!

Alphabet

Alphabet:

Alphabutt:

Having kids makes life so much more awesome--disgusting, but awesome.

P.S. You know what's less awesome and more disgusting? Pinworms.

Talk me down off the ledge, people.