Doilies, The Day After

We've been happily integrating our newest purchases from the Goodwill Outlet Store into our daily lives. Two vintage puzzles, one of the entire world and one of the United States----have not left the living room carpet since they arrived, they're so fun. They're both crazy-intricate, with each tiny state its own tiny puzzle piece in the US puzzle and each tiny ocean its own piece in the world puzzle, although each big ocean is an awesomely big piece and each continent is its own piece, and? There's a compass built in!

I originally bought them for crafting because the world puzzle is missing a couple of its fiddly little oceans and the US puzzle is missing Kansas and Rhode Island, but the girls adore them (and actually I do, too), and Willow learned where California and Nevada live, so there you go.

I am a huge fan of divided plates (I would KILL for a set of elementary school cafeteria trays), so I'm all about these three orange divided plates that I found:
And do not worry, friends and family--Matt and I own these swab thingies that test for lead, and they're all-clear. Can you imagine, though? Instead of the CPSC bullying through that ridiculously overwrought CPSIA which will leave me without a job and without anyplace to buy stuff, they could just make lead swab test kits cheap and readily available, and we citizens could just handle our own shit, thank you very much.

The biggest hit of the day, however?

Paper doilies.

I almost didn't buy them because it was the day after Valentine's Day and doilies are kinda Valentine-y, don't you think, but then I was all, "Oh, they're going to cost like five cents and the girls will like them."

The girls do like them--negative space is fun space--but I think I may like them more. On account of look at the awesome stuff I made:

Goth doily pinbacks! I heart them crazy much. I like how they're partly fussy, but also all cool in their black-and-white at the party way, and I'm an especial fan of how the intricate and fancy doily pattern makes no sense in such a small scale.

And in yet another example (as if you needed another example) of how the girls inspire me and how all my work is collaborative work with them, blah blah, their interest in rainbows--drawing rainbows, reading about rainbows, having me pull up Google Image photos of rainbows, etc.--has led me to create, off and on in my sketchbook, an entire list of rainbow-themed crafts that I'm excited about doing. And when faced with doilies, a hole punch, and pretty paper, I made this:

I made a bunch for myself and my girlies, but I'll be putting these two sets up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop tomorrow. My pinbacks have been hitting the spot lately for some people, and I'm interested in seeing how these versions, which I like kind of crazy much, go over.

You can expect to see lots of frantic paper crafting out of me in the next few days, because Matt took my sewing machine to the repair shop (either it needs a new face plate, or the little girls need to stop touching it when I'm not looking), and the repair shop man said that we could expect it back in about 10 days.

He was just kidding, right?

Right?

The Fourth Photo

Here is the fourth photo in the fourth folder in the Photos folder on my computer:It's a photo of Willow's tricycle on one of those playground mornings that you might only have if you live really close to a playground and go there every day, even if the weather's cold or lousy out--one of those mornings when you're the only ones there, and your kid turns to you and says, "Nobody's visiting my playground today."

This is the tricycle that was Willow's special present after she toilet-trained herself at around two-and-a-half, the tricycle that was stolen out of our yard one morning while we were at the library for storytime, along with a green ride-in car and a brand-new-to-us toy wheelbarrow.

I still miss that tricycle.

Thanks, cake!

Here are some examples of how other bloggers have responded to the Fourth Photo, Fourth Folder project:

• Just a Plane Ride Away
• Terri Terri Quite Contrary
• Giggles-n-Gulps
• KatieAlender
• These Go to Eleven

P.S. I have a new obsession. Check out my post about crafty podcasts over at Crafting a Green World.

We Heart Caribbean Cove

It was another awesome Valentine's/anniversary weekend, thanks to Caribbean Cove water park--it's my super power that no matter where I am outside of the Southern United States, I can still find somewhere to go to be redneck. And indoor water parks, they are the awesomest things ever established in the Northern United States (especially in winter), but soooey!, they are redneck.

Nevertheless, we frolicked in the water----and watched HBO, and played miniature golf in the lobby----and ate heart-shaped bagels at Einstein Bros., and frolicked in the water some more----and made Matt Margaritas (a randomly-measured mixture of tequila, margarita mix, and ice in a little plastic hotel cup) after the girls went to bed, and made crafts (of course!) in the Kid's Club----and shopped at Half-Price Books and the Goodwill Outlet Store (speaking of redneck...), and tricked Matt into standing under things that would dump water on him----and let the girls spend two whole dollars in the arcade (a huge deal, actually, because my thrifty self loathes myself some arcades), and frolicked in the water just a little bit more----and graded all the rest of my papers while watching a Sci-Fi channel original movie (Wyvern!) after Sydney crashed at 6 pm, and there was also some relaxing that took place in the water, too:
See you next Valentine's weekend, Carribean Cove!

Valentine's Day with the Class

I have told you that I used to not be festive at all, right?

Well, I really, really, really love celebrating the holidays with the kids. Even the boring ones--the girls and I are planning to make a memory game next week with images of the U.S. presidents on them (probably just the iconic ones, because who really needs to know what William Henry Harrison looked like?) for Presidents' Day. So yeah, I really love the holidays now.

Today was Willow's class party for Valentine's Day. There was much excitement this morning (if only excitement made little girls act sweet and peaceful and so very well-behaved, and not crabby and hysterical and overwrought and prone to the biting and kicking of sisters). There was the creation of the Special Holiday Outfit: They're really quick and easy--small piece of acrylic felt (I choose the felt made from recycled plastic bottles over wool felt as part of my crafting ethic) cut into a heart shape, with a little slit cut into the center, and buttoned onto your button--but the other Montessori moms gratified my vanity by acting like I had invented something AWESOME! I've actually seen these little hearts on several blogs, including Going Starfishing, and I've heard tell that it was actually invented by Martha Stewart years ago (OMG--It's true! You have to flip through her Valentine's Day Projects for Kids gallery to get to the Felt Heart Button Covers), although frankly I seriously think that she steals the original ideas of small indie crafters and plays them off as her own.

Anyway, then comes the creation of Extra Valentines:Montessori classrooms are very large (30 kids ages 3-6 in Will's class), and the children are encouraged to make Valentines, then, not for everyone in the class, but only for as many or as few people as they choose. I always worry that some kid will just sort of get overlooked by all the other kids and not get any Valentines, and this, combined with my other worry that some kid will forget their Valentines at home, causes me to every year make an extra blank ten or so Valentines in case of Valentine-related emergencies. These are made from hearts cut out of red file folders with more little felt hearts hot-glued onto the centers.

And finally, we have the Viewing of the Handmade Valentines:

If you look closely through her work, you can see all the ones she made during our various collaborations--there are hearts from scrappy heart pinbacks, hearts from comic book Valentines, paint chip tags from paint chip matching games, and even a rogue denim heart from a denim heart quilt.

Will's Final Report: The Valentine's Day Party was the bestest! They got to eat a small cookie, they sang a song, they looked at all their Valentines (Is it wrong to judge a mother because her three-year-old child gave my child a Hanna Montana Valentine?). What more could you ask of heaven?

Lastly, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?

I always pick bad news first, too: Craft magazine has announced that their current issue, #10, is their final print issue. They are pretty renowned for their rockin' digital version of the magazine, so in these trying economic times I guess they're just going to concentrate on that.

Y'all, Craft magazine is the magazine to which I sold my matching game tutorial. And that tutorial? Scheduled to be printed in issue #12.

Matt, who is, um, "practical," is all, "Dude, it's not the end of the world. You already got paid, and you'll be in the digital edition." But..... I want to be in print. PRINT. The kind of print that's on paper, and my mother can go to a bookstore and find me there on the shelf. And people all over the country can go to the library and find me there, too. The LIBRARY, y'all. I was going to be in the LIBRARY.

Yes, there will be lots of other articles by me in print. And books. Lots.

But this was going to be my first. And I am so sad.

Good news? Every Valentine's Day weekend, which is also the anniversary of the date that Matt and I started "dating" 12 years ago, our whole family spends the weekend at Carribean Cove. Indoor water park + middle of winter + cable TV + a new romance novel = Happy Valentine's Day!

Tomorrow, look for me out on the Lazy River.

Her Sister was Never This Rotten

After I set the girls up with lunch yesterday morning, I snuck off into the study for a few minutes to see if I could get another paper graded--we're deep in the midst of Project #1 in my Freshman Comp classes, and grading 44 papers containing an uninsightful application of Seger's hero myth formula to Spiderman makes me want to strangle myself every single semester.

So I grade a paper (70%--sigh), come back to see if anyone wants seconds, and find this:

Peanut butter is really hard to scrape off of the wall. Being a mom, this gets to be one of the things that I now know.

P.S. Check me out on whip up! It's one of my super-favorite blogs, and it's featuring my post from Crafting a Green World about making Valentines from comic books.

Illustrations Re-Illustrated

Earlier this week Willow had the grand idea to make a list of every book she and Sydney own--this mostly served as an excuse to drag all the books off their shelves and stack them on the floor in milk crates that were VERY unpleasant to walk into in the dark, at 3:30 am, on the way from the bathroom.

This morning, however, we finally got down to the meat of the project: While I sat with my computer and typed in the title and author of each book, Sydney sat on the floor and recited every single one as she paged through it----and Willow worked on the equally ambitious project of copying the front cover illustrations of selected books.

Here, for instance, is the cover of Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
: And here is Willow's copy:Here is the cover of Discovering Brachiosaurus (Dinosaur Digs)
:

And here is Willow's copy: And here is the cover of The Little Engine That Could mini
: And here is Willow's copy:

So, not counting their activity/workbooks, their magazines, their crafts books (which are in the study), their chapter books for being read to at bedtime, their board books, or their longer nonfiction books (which are in the basement playroom), the girls have about 130 books.

Is that a weird number? Too extravagent? Too stingy?

I would love to administer a nation-wide survey entitled "How Many Books Does Your Kid Own?"

The Greenhouse has a Room for Spikies

I had to sign my teaching contract on campus yesterday (put off, yes, for over a month, entirely because, with two little girls, the five-second review and signing of a teaching contract takes approximately half the day), so, it being a fine day, we hoofed it up to campus, some of us splashing in mud and sliding up and down huge mounds of slushy snow piled precariously close to busy streets, skulked in and out of Ballantine as surreptitiously as possible (wanting to meet neither teacher nor student while currently deeply ensconced in role of mom), and then hit our hands-down favorite place on campus:

The IU greenhouse:

I hardly dare speak of my love for the IU greenhouse lest it become too commercial, and the next time the girls and I visit we find (gasp!) another person already there!

Because every time we go we have the whole place to ourselves, just us and the gardeners, and we stroll around admiring food crops, tropical plants, water plants, tall plants (See my scientific terminology? The greenhouse has already taught me so much!), and spiky plants.

At each door to the spiky plants, there's a big sign warning that spiky plants live inside. I warn the girls several times over, just as I do every visit, that there are plants inside this room that have prickles and spikes and thorns, and we mustn't touch anything.

So obviously the first thing Willow does upon entering the room is to lay her entire hand upon a small, prickly cactus, the kind that leaves the prickles embedded in your skin as a defensive maneuver. She looked like Old Yeller after the fight with the porcupine.

A hundred prickles, probably, on her already filthy hand.

Is it wrong to feel angry with your child when she hurts herself?

Mental note: next time, bring tweezers to the greenhouse.

Not Inspiration, but Ornamentation

You've probably heard about the inspiration wire--a wire, with clips, near your creative space, upon which you can hang small objects that inspire you. I'm pretty sure SouleMama thought of it first, but feel free to disagree.

I don't personally right this minute really find myself in need of more inspiration, since I spend all day and a lot of the night running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to bring to fruition some of the ideas I've already got, thank you very much, but I do like the idea of a wire.

With clips.

Near your couch.

Upon which you can hang small objects that look pretty.

My invention? The ornament wire:

After much fussing and feuding (Why does the man with the hammer feel that he can offer suggestions? He is clearly there solely to wield the hammer), Matt tacked about eleven feet of jewelry chain (bought on clearance at Joann's months ago) into swag-shapes on the underside of the living room bookshelves. I attached some little clips on hooks (Where, oh where, can I find more clips on hooks?) to some of the links, clipped up some of my Valentines, and--festive!
I'm pretty excited about how we can change the ornaments out whenever we want, and I especially like the swagged chain instead of strung wire, because I think the swags will add more vertical dimension and hooking a clip through an individual chain link will keep my things exactly where I want them.

In other news, I have been so weirdly stressed and twitchy all day. I blame it on Matt, obviously--last night my coughing (I have a nasty cold) was keeping both of us awake, so Matt offered me some medicine. I had just a terrible night's sleep after that--waking up every hour, exhausted but unable to get back to sleep, antsy dreams whenever I did doze--and as I was telling Matt this, he's all, "Hmmm...what color were the pills I gave you last night? Cause the green ones are Nyquil, but the blue ones might be non-drowsy Sudafed."

Thanks, dear.

Untitled, by Julie Finn

So you know that I write, and you know that I have written. And you know that I claim that what I write is much better than what I have written...

Well, another example couldn't hurt.

I have in my possession a childhood treasure that escaped childhood with me, a miracle that can't be said for the Daffy Duck comics, the Sweet Valley High books, or the majority of the Transformers or the Barbie accessories: I have a big, fat, yellow notebook, something that I carried around with me sometime in between the ages of seven and nine, something in which I used to write stories.

Not short stories. No, not short. The story I am going to share with you is nearly 30 painstakingly printed pages long, margins carefully aligned, parts of words occasionally re-written thanks to the miracle of Wite-Out (do you have a bottle of Wite-Out in your house right now? Two points if you do).

We'll do the first two pages tonight, and then see where we go from there. Remember, I was likely between the ages of seven and nine when I wrote this, so you're in, obviously, for a treat.

I present to you:

Untitled, by Julie Finn

One day my cat, Snowball, my dog, Bandit, and I were walking. We saw a dirty, stray dog on the road. She was sick and hungry. I carried her home. I put her on a bunch of pillows in my room and called her Belle. That gave me an idea. With Snowball, Bandit, and Belle's help, we would start a home for animals. Snowball went out to look for poor animals while Bandit helped me build a garden. He carried my hammer while I measured the ground. Then he held the poles with his teeth while I hammered them into the earth. I made a very large cage with wood, chicken wire, and an old door. Then Bandit went along rows digging holes while I followed planting seeds and filling the holes up. I planted carrots, corn, wheat, catnip, parsley, and a tree. Inside, Belle was getting ready for visitors. I had pillows in piles all over my room. Snowball and Bandit slept on my bed. It was a good thing nobody ever came in my room. I even had pillows in my closet. It wasn't long before Snowball came home. She was carrying a bruised kitten in her mouth. I suspected he had been beaten. Since he was so little, he got a baby blanket under my bed and was named Mickey. He got well quickly. After a few days, I started a baby nursery under my bed. There were puppies, kittens, mice, birds, snakes, and other things in cozy cages. In my closet were the very bad cases. Belle even brought home two chickens with broken wings. The snakes seemed to especially like scrambled eggs. All the animals I had I turned into vegetarians except for Mickey, Belle, Snowball, and Bandit. This was to save money. I always found two or three vegetables they really liked and soon I could hold a piece of meat under......their noses and they wouldn't care. But every animal got a piece of meat every other week for health reasons. But one day while Chow, an old poodle, was digging in the backyard he disappeared. I was watching from the window and thought I saw him fall in his hole. I ran to where he was. There was Chow barking. He had dug into some natural caverns and fell in. There were branches leading everywhere. I called Scraps, the bloodhound. He held a rope in his teeth while I climbed down it to get Chow. When I got back up, I screamed "Sooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy!!!!" This called every one of my animals within hearing to me. Soon there was a crowd around me. I set everyone in groups to explore the different branches of the caves. I was in a group with Choc, a St. Bernard whom I rode, Q, a one-eyed monkey, Snowball, Cree, a white mouse, and Lye, a carrier pigeon, who was almost extinct. Every group had a dog, cat, mouse, monkey, and bird in it. McKinley stayed to guard the hole outside since she was an old mouse with arthritis. Mickey was with her to protect her so I wasn't worried. We set off. It was dark so Lye flew ahead with a light flashlight. Soon, though, he turned it off and I saw why. The rocks were luminous. Cree crawled out and put a sample of them in his little mousepack. We walked along in the eerie glow. Then all of a sudden Snowball jumped back. The small passage had widened out into a large cavern. I told Snowball, "Scan!" which means go out and explore. I got off Choc and waited expectantly. Soon, Snow-...

A couple of things creep me out about my childhood prose: 1) I had a better understanding of comma usage than most of my students do, but I didn't know about paragraph breaks? 2) Exactly how much time did I spend alone in my childhood reading books that were too big for me, thinking eerily pretentious thoughts, and not getting any exercise or learning how to appropriately socialize with my peer group?

I'm thinking a lot of time.

The Handmade Valentine Sweat Shoppe Continues

Along with mopping the floor, and baking veggie eggrolls, and doing yet ANOTHER cardio workout with
(Maya is so proud of my commitment this week that she added Desert Sanctuary AND the Latin soundtrack to my workout options), and writing my book, and trying to figure out how to make a cloth grocery sack that looks and behaves exactly like a paper grocery sack, the girls and I spent a while mellowing out making Valentines.

Big girls made Valentines:Small girls made Valentines: And, of course, Momma made an entire sweat shoppe full of Valentines. Out of all my comic book Valentines--Iron Man, X-Men, G.I. Joe, Spiderman, etc.--my favorite, by far, is Wonder Woman:

I tell you what, that lady's got class. Am I right or am I right?

I also like the comic book Valentines on Chris' Invincible Super-Blog. And my book? On every single page, I mention at least two of the following three things: comic books, romance novels, and dinosaurs.

Have I got talent or what?

Charcoal Pudding Tastes Like Charcoal, not Pudding

So yesterday morning I drank coffee, I made peanut butter cookies with the girls, I did my cardio workout with YourselfFitness, I worked on my Valentines while the girls drew some dinosaurs for a book list we're putting together, I wrote, I fixed lunch for the girls (salad, swiss cheese, and faux bologna in a pita), I went to tell them lunch was ready, and I found them both crouched in the hallway, having scaled the linen closet shelves and defeated the child-proof cap, downing an entire bottle of store-brand children's Tylenol.

Dr. Schechter said call National Poison Control. National Poison Control said call Indiana Poison Control. Indiana Poison Control ran some numbers for me (while Willow, who tends to get a little overwrought, ran hysterically weeping from room to room, on each pass shrieking out a new lie to me about how much Tylenol she had consumed--"I only drank one and Sydney drank six!" "I drank six, too!"), and decided that even if Willow had drank the entire bottle of Tylenol, she was still at a non-toxic level, but Sydney?

Sydney and I were taking a little trip to the emergency room.

But of course, since being a stay-at-home mom means that even an emergency is filled with chores of mind-numbing suckage, I first had to call Matt to come get Willow, get both girls dressed (face washed? clean shirt? Cause I seriously might get a visit from Social Services this time), call my bestest mom friend to ask her to pick up Willow after preschool, move Willow's car seat to the other car, take down the two stuffed dinosaurs (T. Rex and pteranodon, in case you're keeping count) that I'd hidden away for the girls' birthdays and give them to them to stave off future hysterics, grab the backpack of car toys, and remind Matt no fewer than 18 times to sign the form in the office giving someone else permission to pick up Willow after school.

Compared to that, the ER was a little relaxing, frankly. If you want service, you really should walk in holding the hand of a cute little red-cheeked, bright-eyed girl in a teddy bear coat and say, "Poison Control sent us." Because you get all kinds of service then.

You get to eat charcoal pudding and drink (non-organic!) milk off and on for four hours:

You get to play with floam and magnet games and color in your sister's(!) coloring book that Momma grabbed my mistake (which said sister actually had the nerve to give me crap about this morning and I'm all, "Lady? You don't even want to start that with me"):And you even get teddy bears! Well, the first teddy bear is free. The second one, however, you must pay for in blood:

To recap, if you keep over-the-counter medicine (children's Tylenol is a crock anyway, partly because accidental overdose is so common (ahem) and I basically only kept it to give Willow a taste as a placebo whenever she gets hysterical because she feels sick (she's gets a little overwrought, remember?)), it's a good idea to make a mental/physical note whenever you dispense it of how much is left in the bottle--that's important to know. It's also a good idea to always know a ballpark number of how much your kid weighs.

If your kid is an idiot and drinks your Tylenol, Poison Control needs those numbers, as well as how much is left undrunk (I used a measuring cup), to do their math. If they send you to the emergency room, you'll have to wait there for four hours, guaranteed, before they can do the blood-draw, since that's apparently the length of time it takes for Tylenol to peak in the bloodstream. You'll also have to feed your kid chocolate pudding spiked with charcoal and non-organic milk. They warned me that kids sometimes vomit up the charcoal, but Syd has a stomach of iron.

So the arbitrary number of Tylenol toxicity in the bloodstream is 100. Syd was a 30, so we got to go home (I tell this to Matt, and he's all, "I wonder what the number for normal is?" I'm all, "Well, dear, since it's a measure of how much Tylenol is in your bloodstream, I'm thinking that the number for normal is, you know, ZERO.") In retrospect, I imagine he meant what is the number for one normal dose, and that is 7.

But of course, I don't only have the sucky chores of a stay-at-home mom to do--hanging out in the ER for five hours, organizing pre-school pick-ups--but also the sucky chores of a working woman, so Syd and I got home just in time for me to upload a couple of handouts to my class Web site, print out some sign-up sheets, change my shirt and brush my teeth, call my mom friend and organize a Willow transer (in a Village Pantry parking lot, on the way to the other kid's violin lesson), and get back in the car and over to my class so that one kid can come up to me crying because she accidentally erased the final version of her paper and only has the rough draft to hand in, and one kid can ask if he can handwrite his Works Cited page because he forgot to do it before, and one kid can ask, "Are we getting out early today?" and then huff grumpily back to his seat when I say, "Um...no."

Because if you want to annoy your instructor, you should make sure she's just spent five hours in the emergency room with her small child, and then you should ask her some whiny question trying to get out of learning and be mad when she informs you that no, come hell or high water, there will be learning done tonight.

At least I got that one thing accomplished.