The Joy of Three

The joy of adding a third button to the birthday crown, the joy of wearing that crown all day, the joy of Willow's preschool teacher saying to you, "What a beautiful crown!" and getting to say back, "Iss my BIRFDAY!!!"

The joy of choosing exactly what cake you want Momma to bake with you (chocolate and stair-steps and pink frosting and rainbow candy), and helping to bake that cake and make the frosting and decorate it, and being too young to know that Momma is TERRIBLE in the kitchen and thus that the cake will look far less like the fairy-pink tiers that she imagined and more like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which Richard Dreyfuss sculpts the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes only pink and with M&Ms melting down it, and the joy of running sobbing to Momma that you broke your big 3 candle when you weren't supposed to be playing with it and having Momma call Daddy at work and having Daddy bring a new 3 candle with him when he gets home, and the joy of seeing your brand-new big 3 candle lit on your hideous pink cake, and the joy of having a sister help you blow it out again (twice):
(It really does look like the Devil's Tower only pink, doesn't it?)

The joy of being a big girl, so big that your Momma for the first time is not haunted so much this year by memories of you in the NICU, and the joy of getting big-girl gifts, a huge stash of Land Before Time toys that Momma bought for you off of ebay and bartered for you from friends (the Anna bunting is in the works, Jenny!).

For me, though, the best gift of all--the joy of being your mother:

Good Eaters

My kids are not picky, thank goodness. They have a lot of "eccentricities" (Will cried herself to sleep in my lap tonight because she does NOT want to walk five times around the ellipse while holding the globe at her school birthday next week. This is great, because her teachers already think I'm a total stage mom), but fussy eating is not one of them.

It's spoiled me as a mom, though. The other day a little friend was over for a playdate with Will, and I served them a snack of peanut butter sandwiches, sliced apples, and frozen blueberries. The kid was all, "I don't eat any of this kind of food," and I was all, "Okay, your mom will have dinner for you tonight, I'm sure." And then my kids ate her share, too.

It's too bad my girlies don't have a gourmet chef for a mother, because they're probably like food savants or something, but we'll never know because I serve them some basic ten-minute-prep combination of protein, two fruits/vegetables, and fiber and/or dairy at nearly every meal. Spring is a good season for us, though--we've got some nice, fresh, local foods coming in that we haven't tasted for a while, and then it must be like a fall harvest time in the southern hemisphere or something, because we scored ourselves a bounty of pineapples and avocados and bananas at the store this week (not local, no, and certainly not organic, except for the bananas, but we are pure suckers, plain and simple, for pineapples and avocados).

So last night we had "Big Salad," which is what the girls dub it when I fill all the little compartments on their dinner trays with nice, raw, delicious things--kale, pineapple, sesame seeds, apple and orange slices, bananas, avocado--and some bread, cheese, and soysage, too, of course:
It was yummy, says the look of their faces, and such a nice change from the root vegetables and pastas and casseroles of the winter:
The nice thing about these kids, though, is that they help me to expand in all my capacities. We have had a juicer since our wedding day, and we have not used it once. And yet, at some point I must have mentioned the existence of said juicer to my children (I can't believe I even remembered it), because they have been asking me off and on for months to get out the juicer and make them some juice. I stalled them all winter, because there's just not an ample-enough produce stock in the winter to justify playing with a juicer, but with two pineapples and a big bag of kale and a bunch of bananas and a bag each of apples and oranges hanging around the kitchen, I could stall no longer, and so we juiced: And juicing? Is awesome. It's so easy that Syd can feed the juicer independently, if I stand near and unnecessarily warn her every two minutes to watch her fingers. We made juice All. Freakin' Day (This also might be because we were stuck inside as workers dismantled the tree next door, branch by branch, pausing only to sit on their coolers in the shade in between the houses and talk trash about my lawn, apparently not realizing that our windows are open and I can HEAR THEM--dudes, my yard is not THAT bad, and I LIKE the grass long, and we EAT the dandelions so of course we're not going to spray them). Kale and pineapple is the best combination, in my opinion, although the girls' juice was pretty much just a composite of every single thing--kale, pineapple, orange, apple, banana--every single time.

But yeah. Awesome nevertheless.

Happy Free Comic Book Day!

I hope you went by your favorite indie comic book store yesterday and gave them some love--and got your four free comics!
I was happy to see that our favorite comic book store, Vintage Phoenix, was super-crowded yesterday, and doing a pretty hopping business, too. I managed to support them with my own two dollars and change (I looooooove the 25-cent comics bins). The girls, handed down the solemn honor of being able to pick out four free comics EACH, spent themselves quite some time perusing the possibilities...
Owly was back again this year. Owly is an AWESOME comic for pre-readers because it tells the story without words--it's still linear, though, so it's excellent independent reading practice. Oh, and it's really good:
We're going to read all the comics I bought, of course, but of course you all know their ultimate fate:
Yep, I craft with comics.

If you had some doubts that perhaps I'm not a rabid-enough fangeek, check out all the comics stuff up in my etsy shop:

• Comic Book Dialogue pinback buttons
• Comic Book scrapbook tags
• Captain America T-shirt dress
• Spiderman quilt

And, um...that doesn't even include the stuff I'm going to make from the comics I bought yesterday.

Crafty Garden

While my Matt did design work on my book proposal all day, the girls and I spent breakfast-time-- (yep, we even have to dye our cream cheese pink around here) to dinner time--
(What? You don't permit your preschoolers to have a nice candlelit dinner every now and then?) wreaking havoc in the garden.

There were blossoms to pick off of things that I wish the girls wouldn't pick blossoms off of:

And dinosaurs to romp amongst the birdhouse gourd seedlings (and mulch leftover from the neighborhood clean-up day!):
Other components of my crafty garden are bushel basket gourds, lavender, rosemary, spearmint, catnip, and sunflowers. I'm hoping to grow my pole beans up my sunflower stalks, by the way--that sounds reasonable, right? I'm also hoping to include some obviously reclaimed elements into my garden design--powder blue sink I found by the side of the road YEARS ago, a couple of old drawers, etc.

The girls also had a ball picking out critters from our yummy compost harvest:

And we managed to completely uproot an entire ant colony--oops:

Yep. All day, a trip to the recycling center for newspapers and cardboard, and several emergency consultations with , and I managed to plant, like, eight things.

You're not going to believe the crazy-best news, though--this worker came over to our house this afternoon and warned us not to park our cars on the street on Monday or Tuesday because our next-door-neighbor's sugar maple tree is rotted out and they're going to have to cut the whole thing down.

He's talking about the sugar maple that sits JUST SOUTHEAST OF MY FRONT GARDEN PLOT!!!

I may just have one spot in my yard this summer that can accurately be described as "full sun"!!!

Rest in peace, next-door-neighbor's sugar maple. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

P.S. I've finally had some time to list the first of my vintage button alphabet. Check it out in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

We're All Going to Be Max

I swear that I'm not a fan of book-t0-movie adaptations, and an entire movie based on a picture book? And yet...

Where the Wild Things Are looks AWESOME!!!

It might be the song that makes me so happy, because I'm a fan of Arcade Fire, but also, that Max costume kills me. So iconic, nostalgic but not in a saccharine way, because Where the Wild Things Areis all about childhood angst. Who can't relate to that?

And the release date is October 16. Know what that means?

Well, Will expended quite the amount of energy last year thinking up a Halloween costume, but she won't have to this year, because this year I am going to make them each a Max costume.

And perhaps one for myself...

Cookies and Course Evaluations

I looked up this morning from finishing up posting grades on a few last homeworks to find a monkey in the mulberry tree:
I stuck my head out the window to say hi, and Willow mentioned she was stuck, so we discussed some strategies for remedying that unfortunate situation--Will's first suggestion was that she climb further out onto the branch to make it bend lower to the ground, which I actually thought was pretty clever, but I had to point out that it just seemed a little too risky to try. Eventually she compromised with my suggestion that she wasn't so high that she couldn't lower herself from the limb, hang by her hands, and then drop to the ground. I'm very big on proper dropping procedure--loose muscles, land on your feet, immediately let yourself fall onto your butt--so it ended up going pretty well.

That, however, was not the big adventure for the day, because today was (Hallelujah!!!) my last class of the semester! My students drive me nuts, and I never do grow to like all of them, but over the course of the semester I do become very fond of most of them, and extremely fond of a few of them. They're usually funny, most of them, and sincere, and pretty good sports, and on the last day of classes I like to bake them cookies. It's my secret way of giving them a little love.

Some semesters I go homemade, some semesters I go straight Pillsbury, but this semester I went for Pillsbury with homemade cream cheese icing. I've got some professional-grade food coloring, and I had this whole plan to let the girls explore color mixing, but why the hell would you want to discuss the difference between a dye and a pigment and what a tone is versus what a shade is when you could just be doing this? Or this? Ah, well. It was a Practical Life exercise, in that I taught them how to mix the icing inside a sealed plastic bag and then cut a corner off of the bag to decorate with it, and an exercise in Good Works for Others, in that we decorated the cookies not for ourselves, but for my students. We'll do color mixing tomorrow.

My cookies are pretty luscious-looking, I think, with the course number of the composition class I teach iced on top: Pretty festive, don't you think?

The girls' cookies, however, are in a world of their own:

I let them decorate with some of the Ouchie Candy Stash (you and your sister only get a piece if one of you is SERIOUSLY hurt, real tears, no faking) which itself is left over from a holiday gingerbread house.

But don't worry--there are a couple of cookies (and a couple of cold beers) left over for my own private end of the semester celebration. Because I'm fond of them, but they were still assholes for most of the semester, and also?

I have 42 final papers to grade now.

P.S. Check out my rules for tree climbing over at Eco Child's Play.

In Which My Button Fancy Gets a Little Ridiculous

So you might remember that one of my ongoing projects is to incorporate some digital design into my product line--prints, perhaps, or digital collage elements, or even scrapbooking supplies. It seems like a better long-term crafting choice, since I can continue to get payback from the same piece of work over and over, along with the physical handicraft option of one payback for each piece of work that I craft.

Add to this the crazy amount of time that I've been spending lately rifling through my button collection, futzing around to make monograms and such (I'm also trying to reinvent the button ring--more on that later), and I've been thinking that likely the whole world would really pretty much enjoy digital access to all my beautiful physical buttons. I listened to this one episode of the some crafty podcast in which Maggie Taylor Carroll, who did this super-awesome digitally illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ( Other illustrated Wonderlands that I like are ) talked about how many elements of her work were made from actual stuff that she just threw on the scanner and scanned, and...
I'd title it "Button Porn," but when I titled a Crafting a Green World post Quilt Porn a few months ago, I got some weird traffic.

But see, that's not even porn-y enough for you, is it? I know that you're looking at the big scan, and you're thinking, "All those buttons make me so happy, but they're so small that I can't really see the detail in each button. Darn!"

Here you go, then:


So now instead of just futzily gluing and hand-sewing buttons to make each monogram, I can first futzily lay the buttons that I want to use out on the scanner and scan them, and then later I'll be able to futz around some more with the digital images of the buttons!

My summer is looking so fly, I tell you.

In other news, it's a rainy morning here. That means that instead of letting the girls run around outside for hours on end (they keep taking their pants off outside! What's UP with that?), we'll be spending a hoppin' few hours on...
You guessed it. Dinosaur Bingo.

Perspectives

From above:
From below:From above:From below:
Those kids remind me to change my perspective MANY times daily.

Luna? Not So Much.

Ominously, the first craft fair of the season was quite...eh.

Mind you, all the stuff was there. Quilts:
Pinback buttons: Gift Tags: And some new stuff that I've been making with these terrific upholstery remnants that I scored a few weeks ago:

There was even my own personal troll-girl who crouched under the table and played with stuff for five hours:

Customers, though? Not so much. And customers wishing to purchase things? Um, there were even fewer of those, at least for me--the hallway where we set up is kind of narrow, so vendors could have been making a killing just three tables down and I wouldn't have known. There wasn't so much being killed right near me.

The experience was educational, however. All of my sales were very small--I didn't sell any item that cost over $5--so that tells me that I'll likely need to bone up on a LOT of really small items for my craft fairs this summer. Of course, it's actually harder to make a good profit if you're selling really small items, because you obviously have to sell 60 $1 buttons to make the same amount of money as you can from one $60 T-shirt quilt, but whatever a girl's gotta do, I guess.

People seemed to like the belly dancers. Perhaps I could belly dance just inside my booth? Draw in the customers? Earn some extra singles?

Day in the Sun

It was the best sunny, warm, breezy, cloudless day yet! I know I was pretty stressed at times in the past few months (what odd freshman comp classes I've had this year...), but it must have been a harder winter than I thought, because I never remember being this ridiculously stoked for Spring!

But finally, finally, the lilac is in bloom right outside our front door:
And although I did spend much of the day at a cloth diapering class and the Montessori Garage Sale (I bought a lathe! A LATHE!!! For $15!!! I can't even let myself think about it until my semester's officially over, but I'm so excited), much more of the day was spent outside, at the park, in the sunny, cloudless, warm, breezy air.

I finished my last photo shoot for my book proposal:
One awesome kid permitted me to join her high, high up in her favorite climbing tree:
While the other kid stayed on the ground, enjoying some watercolors al fresco:
And now the babies are asleep, although the sun is barely down (thank you, day full of fresh air and tree climbing), and my Matt is at a Flight of the Conchords concert (I can't stand them, so thank you as well, small children in need of a mother's care), leaving me to happily blog away and craft a few last-minute things for tomorrow:

If only it wasn't Little 500 weekend, causing the emanations from my open windows to sound more like a zombie invasion (sirens, wordless screams, drumbeats, squealing tires) and less like a peaceful warm spring night...

Eh. As long as Matt makes it home tonight without getting a "walking drunk" violation, which my students tell me totally exists, but if you have $265 in cash you can pay your fine right then and avoid being sent to jail (what these kids are doing here without their mothers, I'll never know), it'll all be good.

P.S. Check out my post about crafting with wood over at Crafting a Green World.

In Between Teaching, Writing, and Parenting...

I sewed:
So refreshing.

I tend to have a lot of irons in the fire, with a lot of plans for far more irons, so it's easy for me to let myself get really panicky about all that I have to do, and all that I haven't yet done, if I'm not careful:

• LOTS of homework papers that I *should* grade and alphabetize to pass back to my students on Wednesday. It will give me less to do when I'm trying to grade and record final papers, and my students will appreciate knowing their grades up to the final--of course, it will also give them more scope for pestering me with whining...
• LOTS of things that I *should* craft for Luna Fest on Sunday--one set of button alphabets to finish and another that I could sell as a set; several sets of crayon rolls, marker rolls, and colored pencil rolls, allowing me to sell them individually or as gift sets; melted crayons; doily pinbacks, etc.
• A couple of last tutorials, some photos, and a LOT of proofreading and design work on my book proposal, and then having it copied and bound and sending it--I really, really wanted to send it this week. Sigh.
• How great would it be to write a couple of pattern zines to have ready at Luna Fest, and also for my pumpkinbear etsy shop? Wouldn't you totally want a hip, indie zine that would tell you how to make a superhero T-shirt dress?
• If I don't post regularly on Crafting a Green World and Eco Child's Play, then I don't earn my craft supplies budget for the next month. No craft supplies=suckage.
• The Montessori Parents' Library, for whom I am the Parents' Library librarian, could use a Wish List, written self check-out instructions, signage, and CD copies of all the expert lectures that are on--ugh--cassette tapes.
• Speaking of...when did I last update my pumpkinbear etsy shop?

On the plus side, the kiddos are happy and engaged (barring some minor drama with Music Day--how did I manage to convince Will's teachers that I am some kind of rabid stage mom, when the truth is that I don't give a flying flip whether or not she performs the bumblebee song in front of her classmates and parents?), with a mama who helps them put together the velociraptor puzzle and reads the dinosaur encyclopedia to them for one solid hour and makes gluten-free brownies with them in the morning.

Come to think of it, did I eat anything today other than a butt-load of gluten-free brownies? Maybe that explains it...

P.S. Check out my list of eco-crafting tutorials for Earth Day over at Crafting a Green World.

I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

The girls and I spent the day up in Indianapolis on Friday. We hit all my favorites--the Goodwill Outlet Store (I'm saving the INCREDIBLE puppet theater I scored for another post), the opening season of the butterfly exhibit at the Indianapolis Zoo--

--and the Indianapolis Art Museum:
As I was shooting this photo of Willow in the contemporary gallery, and Sydney was happily stomping on the floor just behind me, with another photographer shooting another exhibit in a little niche just behind her, all of a sudden this huge guard starts running towards me, screaming at me to stop right now!

I'm all, "What? The baby can't stomp on the floor?"

And he's all, "You CANNOT take photos in this gallery!"

Without thinking, the first thing I do is whip around, point with my entire arm straight at that other guy taking some pictures in the nook, and shout, "But HE'S taking photos!"

The guard turned around and started shouting at the other guy, so I grabbed both the girls' hands and said, "We gotta go." Then we hightailed it.

Two minutes later, safely down the elevator, I stopped to think about it and I thought, "Really, Julie? You seriously sold out a stranger over a 'no photo' policy?" I can't believe that my instinctual reaction was to throw the blame and then flee. I mean, what kind of person does that?

I actually saw the guy a few minutes later and of course I apologized. He, of course, said it was no big deal, because, you know, it's just a "no photo" policy, not a criminal act, which makes it just even more ridiculous that I sold out a stranger and then ran.

Painting on the grass in the museum gardens was much more relaxing:
Although now I wonder--I hope there wasn't a rule about not being on the grass...

Our New Bible

I am totally wiped after spending the day working on the marketing section of my book proposal (I have one more project tutorial to photograph, but the rain! The rain! It thwarts me!), but Matt was at the library with the girls this afternoon (See? THIRD time this week!)--this was after he had to rush over to Montessori because I, hunched over my computer tapping away about speaker engagements and family-friendly workshops, suddenly had the heart-rending revelation that Willow! We missed her parent/teacher conference! It was half an hour ago!...

...anyway, AFTER the parent/teacher conference (don't worry friends, we have a strategy for Music Day, and the teachers are considering changing the entire format of Speaker's Rug just to slyly trick Willow, who is the only child in the history of the program to have gone two years without speaking once, because she is my baby and she is stubborn, into feeling comfortable enough to speak. It's like Baby Toastmasters in that class), Matt took the girls to the library so I could miserably tap away some more (Writers don't actually like to write, you know. Writers only like to have written), and as he was scanning a shelf of new non-fiction titles, Will pulled a random book off of a nearby shelf and said, "Daddy, I really want you to check this out."

"Oh, yeah?" said Matt, and turned around to see:
Smart kid. They probably have a whole chapter in there about how you aren't supposed to ditch your kid's parent/teacher conferences.

You Can Keep What You Can Carry

This can be my new mantra, since the girls and I went to a program at our public library in which the girls each received, and then got to DECORATE, their very own book bag.

I'm telling you, we go to the library a lot, and the library book problem here at home is getting pretty desperate. Not only do I have my entire bookshelf just for library books that I only return when I absolutely have to, and then when I do return them I just use another card to request them, but the girls have TWO entire bookshelves just for the library books that they, too, have a hard time returning. Even Matt has a little library book problem, although try and get him to admit it.

Seriously, we went to the library twice this week, and both times we came home with a huge stack of books for the girls. Does everyone do that? Are we the kind of family who thinks everything that we do is normal just because we do it, but then the girls are going to grow up and learn that their childhoods were seriously? Messed. UP.

Anyway, the library program was awesome, and not just because our favorite librarian, my dear friend Mrs. Christina, was in charge (she and I were talking about this, like, truck porn you can get for little kids who are into cars and trucks and heavy machinery--it's hour-long videos with just these shots of trucks, you know, and zooming in on the headlights and the wheel wells and watching them spin their tires in the mud, real fetish stuff, but you're not supposed to call kid obsessions fetishes, please remember that).

No, the program was awesome because of all the fabric paint! Tubes and tubes of it, in color after color, the kind you brush with brushes and the kind you squeeze from the tubes directly onto the fabric and TWO kinds of fabric markers! We get there and get our totes, and all the other kids are kind of hanging back like they don't know what to do or they're scared to draw on their tote bag, but my kids are all, "Hell, YEAH!" and in they dive:
I'm not kidding, y'all. It may be hard to notice in this photo, but I'd like to point out that in it, Syd is painting with a brush--in each hand:
We were the first ones there and the last ones to leave. Christina actually had to give Will an old shirt of her own kid's because I couldn't take Will to school looking the way she ended up, in her thrifted Gap velour dress, no less (I'm sure the program notes read "dress to mess," but I forgot to read the program notes).

The cost of mess, though--look at those bags!

How many books do you think will fit in each one? Ten? Fifteen?

Forty?

P.S. Check out my cloth diapering class tomorrow from 2:00-4:00 at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids--new location!

My Avatar is Also a Fangeek

You might remember that directly after Sydney's toilet-training celebration (the new panties, the present, the Baking of a Treat), I bought a butt-load of these little wooden peg people from Casey's Wood Products.

I had always intended to paint them (there are some examples of exquisitely-painted little peg people on etsy, if you're curious), but they are really small, and whenever the girls and I paint...let's just say that we work well with a LARGE canvas. A large big-ole-mess-of-acrylic-paint-everywhere kind of canvas.

However, decorating our wooden Easter eggs with Sharpies went so exceedingly well that yesterday we dragged all the Sharpies (fine and larger points) back out, kidnapped a handful of peggies from the dollhouse, and went to town.

As I'd expected, the kiddos were more interested in experiencing the process of coloring the interesting curves and wooden texture than in drawing "dolls", per se, but after much careful work in which my reach just nearly exceeded my grasp, I did succeed in creating my own little peggie avatar:

I decided to go minimalistic, to disguise the reality that I have no idea how to make proportional arms, or a nose, or even a mouth. Or even eyes, really, so it's a good thing that I wear glasses, because I can totally do those.

But not the earpiece parts. That seemed hard.

We'll do this project several more times, I imagine, so it's my hope that Willow, at least, will eventually want to make her own peggie avatar. If not, though, I plan to recruit my Matt to finish out the family.

Cause don't YOU want to watch your private family dynamics played out by preschoolers in the setting of a dollhouse?