Family Hour: Uncle Wiggily

If I start dinner by 5:00 (which means we haven't had any afternoon playdates or visitors, or gone anywhere too fun for too long after school, and we don't plan to go anywhere fun in the evening), and I sit down with the girls to eat by 6:00 (which means they're not too involved in play to pitch a fit about dinnertime, and they haven't been too involved in helping me make dinner to delay its production, and they haven't wooed me away from dinner prep to read stories or help with games so that dinner is burned), and Matt can get home to join us by at least 6:30 (he generally nukes a chicken breast to add to my vegetarian dinners, and he also eats REALLY slowly, and the girls also finish first and then pester the life out of him because they're so excited to see him), we generally have time for an hour or so of doing something all together as a family starting at around 7:00 (if it doesn't take too long to straighten out a play area, and if the girls don't have a tantrum about helping to clean up after dinner, and if they're not already totally exhausted from their day and clearly ready for bed):
Uncle Wiggily is a favorite choice. Willow has mastered the game by now and just enjoys playing it, but Syd still has a lot to explore in terms of number recognition and turn-taking and moving the piece one hop per number and stopping when you've reached that number, etc.:

And at around 8:00, we all write where we've left off on a sticker so we can start there again the next time, and then we have teeth-brushing, pajamas, a chapter of Bambi, an episode of Meerkat Manor, some streaming Pandora radio in the dark, and then it's just the dad and me.

We're exhausted, of course.

Made-from-Scratch Gingerbread House, Part One: Infrastructure

We did some things differently this year:

No kit gingerbread house, with its thick, heavy slabs of inedible gingerbread.
No royal icing, because raw egg whites? No.

This gingerbread is made from scratch, and even if I have to get out my hot glue gun, it will NOT fall down, by god.

Instead of those gingerbread house kits, (and boy, they were tempting, and priced to sell!), I used the basic gingerbread recipe from the Celebrating Christmas web site. I was extremely surprised to note that this recipe calls for no ginger--where the hell did it get the name gingerbread, then?--and there's no point in the recipe that actually calls for the one-half cup of water listed in the ingredients, although when the gingerbread dough still seemed extremely dry at the end of the recipe, I noticed that half-cup of water, threw it in, and...perfect!!!

At one point in time (our wedding, perhaps?) we were gifted with a set of about a billion plastic cookie cutters--over the years I've culled the absolutely ridiculous ones, so that we're left with a somewhat basic set of shapes, with a few seasonal cutters and some vintage odds and ends that I've collected here and there (mental note: buy me some dinosaur cookie cutters sometime!). For the gingerbread house, after I got the man to roll out the chilled dough to the perfect 3/16 of an inch thickness--
--I used a smallish square with a triangle whose base matched the length of the square right on top of it, and I cut around the two with a steak knife so that I wouldn't cut the shape in two:This is the front and rear of the house with the gable on top. That same small square can make the two sides of the house, and any larger square can make the two sides of the roof, with eaves that extend appealingly on all sides.

The dough recipe made enough for me to make a house for each of the girls, and probably could have made one or two more houses if you didn't allow for two little girls, one small--

--and one a little larger----to cut out their own gingerbread masterpieces.

And thus, at rest lie future gingerbread mansions, unaware of their glorious fate:

Wait until you see what we're using instead of royal icing.

Bright Little Fingernails

Basically the only way that the girls will let me trim their nails is if I announce, apropos of nothing, "Hey, let's trim your nails really quick so that you can paint them!"I'm pretty sure this would work with boys, too, because the nail polish colors are AWESOME--purple basecoat with alternating green polka dots and orange stripes, or each fingernail half red and half pink and the thumb is blue, or, if you're a traditionalist, you could just go for the red and white "candy cane" paint job.
Of course, this is mainly the plan in the little girls' heads. No matter how carefully I talk them through proper manicure procedure, the paint job does always reveal itself to be child-engineered in a multitude of ways. But, eh--the kids love it anyway.

Best part, though?

The best part is however long I can convince them to sit quietly just like that so that their nails can dry. It's never long enough to actually allow their nails to dry fully, of course, but I will take any small amount of peace that I can get.

Stash Wrap

The goal? Wrap all my Christmas presents using only my stash, none of which consists of traditional wrapping materials.

Okay, my real goals are as follows:

• Finish making all my Christmas presents, wrapped or not.
• Have a couple of the girls' friends and their moms over for hot chocolate after school on Friday and actually be prepared with hot chocolate and pumpkin bread and a clean(ish) house.
• Make a gingerbread house from scratch with the girls. Have this house be extremely unlike last year's failed gingerbread shack.
• Psych myself up for Christmas week with my parents.
• Stop eating when I'm bored.

But wrapping my Christmas presents using only stash is also a good goal, don't you think?

Katie's quilt was the easiest, requiring only a piece of twine. These gifts from the girls to their small cousins (handmade matching games, which I'll talk you about later, but trust me, they are SUPER fun), are wrapped in an envelope folded from notebook paper, with a hole punched in the top flap and a piece of ribbon threaded through and tied in a knot to close the envelope--no glue or tape required!This handmade present from the girls to one grandma is tied with some wide satin single-fold bias tape--I used to use this type of bias tape when I first started making simple quilts, before I knew how easy it was to make my own bias tape, and so I don't remember if I bought this bias tape way back then or later acquired it as a hand-me-down from someone. I tied the bow separately and hot-glued it and the gift tag on. When wrapping gifts, I am starting to heart myself some hot glue!

This is another present to another grandmother, but tied this time with a wired ribbon. I bought this ribbon on clearance post-Valentine's Day one year because I wanted to see if I liked wired ribbon--I don't:

And, of course, the ubiquitous gift wrapped in the comic section:I made a nice, big bow out of strips cut out from the comics, but I didn't use any proper bow-making method, just lots of hot glue.

Only twelve more child-free hours until Christmas! Tomorrow, especially since there's no storytime at the library, I dearly desire to complete three little superhero capes for three little superhero cousins. I also desire to finish The Liar's Club, make gingerbread dough, and buy cinnamon essential oil.

Ah, to dream...

Willow Blogs: A Car Could Go Anywhere, Except on the Grass

This car is mostly for driving, but the red thing on top falls off all the time:
This is the bottom. It was very hard to build it. There's a sword on the other side of the axe, but you can't really see it. They're mostly for pretend killing people that are Lego mens. The pinwheel would blow if it was a real car. Sometimes it falls off. The arm that's on the car is mostly for chomping people that are pretend bad guys. Now, as you can see, on the rest there's a window down at the bottom, and then there's some wheels: If it was a real car, that red thing on top would swing:

You can drive it around, but some things will fall off. If you hold on too tight, some things will fall off from the car.

A T-Shirt Quilt for Christmas

Some leftover bias tape that just happened to match the blanket back, a couple of hours machine-binding while watching episodes of Miami Ink on Netflix (If you got another tat, what would it be?), and one Christmas present is done and DONE:
I don't get to see my little cousins often enough (although thank gawd for Facebook), so it was quite fun to get this glimpse into the life and times of a 13-year-old girl. I love, for instance, how a teenager's passions can so easily range from air-brushed dolphins--
--to sexy werewolves:I'm totally on Team Jacob, too. Real men don't sparkle.

And, personalized T-shirts? Make wrapping Christmas presents WAY easier:
Next on Santa's list are superhero capes for three even littler cousins. And since that means getting out the Cricut, who knows what other wonders will emerge?

Coloring Page Christmas Ornaments

I make these with my girls because it enables me to goof around with my scanner and my laminator, but if you're a working girl I imagine that you could goof around just as well with your photocopier and the local copy shop.

1. Find some nice holiday-themed coloring pages. Coloring books are probably the way to go, but since we don't actually do coloring-within-the-lines coloring all that much, I get way more coloring pages than I can use each week in my free Dover samplers. You'll be shrinking these coloring pages, so choose some that are meant for younger children, with broad lines and easy to color big spaces.

2. You have a couple of options for shrinking your coloring pages to ornament-size. I scan my coloring pages, shrinking them in the process, then set them up on one page in a graphic design software program. You could also set up a bunch of full-size pages in a photocopier and shrink them to the correct document size.

Another option, for super-littles or when you want to make multiples (these are great to enclose in Christmas cards), is to have your child color the picture full-size, then color-copy and shrink or scan and shrink the finished document.

3. Print out a few copies of the ornament-sized coloring pages, and let the littles color them in. When Matt took the girls to a program on the Nutcracker at the public library the other weekend, they actually got sent home with some coloring pages meant to be used for ornaments, so my littles had a ball coloring in small nutcracker princes and sugarplum fairies and mouse kings on circular decorated backgrounds.

4. Cut out the coloring pages. I like to back mine with Christmas scrapbook paper, attached by a dab of glue stick (since I'm going to be laminating the whole shebang in a minute), but you could also make your ornament double-sided, or just forget about backing it and get the damn thing done, already.

5. Laminate the ornament, then cut a hole in the laminate for an ornament hanger.

6. The best part is the decoration:
At least it seems that way from the look on my littler little's face:

Manic housecleaning and a screening of Dinosaur Hunters are the sole items on the docket today, but tomorrow I have big plans for popsicle stick Christmas trees and potholders for my grandfather.

Outsourcing My Quilt Designs

I'm sewing a T-shirt quilt for my little cousin Katie this Christmas (this is no secret, or otherwise I imagine she'd have been asking her mom, "Where are all my T-shirts?"). After cutting out all the pieces for a one-block quilt from Katie's T-shirts, Willow found me on her bed yesterday, about to lay out a design for the quilt on top of her comforter. Will asked if she could lay out the quilt, instead, and never one to turn down an offer of unpaid labor, I agreed:
The final design certainly wasn't the kind of pattern I would have made it into, but it wasn't random, either, and although it's not something that I'd permit Willow to have free reign on in a quilt for a paying customer, she adores her big cousin Katie, and I was happy to give her the chance to add something permanent to Katie's world:
Sydney served as photo-documentarian for the event, catching Willow deep in concentration as she figures out some key detail in her layout:Catching me taking the pieces back up in the exact right order to ensure that I sew them correctly:And then catching us in post-layout celebration:
Now it just needs to be pieced, backed, bound, and wrapped.

Sweatpants, Skirts, and Teaching Tops

One thing about living in a university town and working at that university is that you meet a lot of undergrads. Matt works with interns and the Student Alumni Association club, and as for me, I've got 40 or so freshmen that I engage in conversation and woo into some semblance of understanding of the analytical process and its reflection in rhetoric for three hours twice a week, not counting office hours.

And when you talk to undergrads that much for that long, you 1) gain a terrific understanding of popular television (I swear, half my students are writing their final papers on The Girls Next Door), and 2) do NOT gain an understanding of contemporary fashion. Um, why do I want sweatpants with words written on the butt?

And leggings came back? Seriously?

And apparently (because we had an entire conversation about this), you're still supposed to tan in the winter, but not as much because you don't want to get too dark, and you have to REALLY tan, like in the booth, because everyone can tell when you've spray-tanned because it DEF looks orange.

All this is to say that I don't dress like a freshman, but I bet you could have figured that out on your own. If there was a Torrid in town I'd probably throw my second-hand shopping ethic out the window--hell, I'd probably have my own Torrid card the way my mama used to have a Dillard's card because she bought so much there--but until then, I rely on the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale days and going through every piece of clothing in the store to find a few pieces that I like. So I bought low-rise cargo pants and a couple of tops designed to show off the tons of money that I have invested in a really great bra (my friend Molly calls these "boob tops").

I bought Matt a few more pairs of sweatpants, because he likes to go to the gym every night while I'm putting the girls to bed (chapter from whatever book we're reading, episode of Meerkat Manor, sitting in the dark goofing off on the computer while playing Pandora and waiting for snores).

And I bought the girls skirts:
And skirts:

And yet more skirts: Syd is the one who is obessed with skirts and dresses (dubbed "quitty kwothes"). Will likes herself a pair of good, soft pants, but will also wear the same dinosaur T-shirt for as many days as it take for me to get sick of it and rip it off of her body. Sydney will change entire outfits four times a day, easy (each time putting the entire old outfit in the dirty laundry, unless I catch her. This is one of the reasons that I'm teaching the girls to do their own laundry this month), and actually has a knack for putting together really interesting outfits that somehow work.

And she only has a few skirts, mostly Momma-made and thus all of the same style. So I skirted them up.

Also bought during the sale: a keyboard that may or may not work for lessons, so we'll do some research before the return period is up; a picturebook of Longfellow's Hiawatha poem; a tiny little loaf pan (Matt is all, "What are you going to make with this?" "Um, tiny little loaves?"); and yet another little horse.

Still on the must-buy-secondhand list: ice cream maker, new-ish crockpot (there are tons of older crockpots in thrift stores, but they're supposed to be fire hazards or something), and a black hoodie and an AWESOME cool-looking grey denim jacket with a stripe on the sleeve to replace those same articles of clothing, both bought previously at Goodwill, that I have left at one time or another in my classroom on campus and thus lost, leaving me broken-hearted.

Although if some other freshman stole my clothes, that does mean that they were up to their trendy freshman standards, I suppose.

DIY Wipe-Off Handwriting Sheets for the Littles

As it is now December, I should be concentrating on making gifts for family and friends, and shepherding the girls through making their gifts, as well, but something about being required to work on a deadline just makes me...rebel.

And so that's why, even though my To-Do list for yesterday read, partially, "take girls to gymnastics, buy coffee creamer, answer student emails, grade Project #5 rough drafts, START KATIE'S QUILT," I instead, while loading the dishwasher (for the second time that day), had a brilliant idea for making some wipe-off handwriting/vocab sheets for some of the books that the girls have been especially into lately.

And after I finished loading the dishwasher, instead of getting out the template for cutting out the pieces to Katie's quilt, I dragged out an old handwriting tablet and the laminator and immediately made ten or so wipe-off handwriting/vocab sheets.

To do this, you just need a child's handwriting tablet, a nice fat marker, and a laminator. Children's handwriting tablets are larger than your typical notebook paper, so if you're using a laminator designed for that particular width, you will need to trim your paper before you begin.

On the left side of each line on the tablet, write a vocabulary word yourself in your best printing (ugh). Make two pages of vocabulary words, because you might as well make your handwriting page double-sided. I themed mine based on the books the girls and I have been reading over and over lately--Little House in the Big Woods, with words like "Ma," "Pa," "Laura," "Mary," and "Minnesota;" Bambi, with words like "Bambi," "Mother," "Father," "Faline," "Gobo," and "Old Prince;" The Nutcracker, with words like "Tchaikovsky," "Clara," "Nutcracker," and "Sugarplum Fairy," and "The Night Before Christmas," with the names of all the reindeer, of course (it's "Donder," not "Donner"--did you know?).

Line up two pages neatly back-to-back, and then laminate them. Because I've organized most of the girls' paper-based activities into a file folder box, I stapled a file folder into a pocket, and stapled an envelope on the front of the pocket to hold a dry-erase marker and a flannel cloth for wiping off the marker.

And then, the next morning while you're reading the newspaper and drinking a nice, big mug of coffee, your girls can practice reading their pages:
Using a dry-erase marker, they can trace over your words:
They can copy your words: And when they're done, they can wipe the marker off with their little flannel cloth:

Because this is how I enable myself to drink an entire cup of coffee in peace.

When It's Raining Outside, Jump Around Inside

Most of our local gymnastics studios do this completey ingenious thing--a couple of mornings a week for an hour or so, they open up their entire studio to free play by preschoolers. All the equipment, all the space, all the stuff. At four bucks per kid, it's an activity that's too expensive for me to take the girls to regularly, at least not when there are so many good free activities geared to preschoolers nearly every weekday morning, but one gym, Rising Star, occasionally offers this open play time free for an entire month.

And thus begins our month of regularly-scheduled antics:I never took gymnastics classes as a child, so a lot of this stuff I'm just guessing at, but I think that this long trampoline must be used for practicing floor routines, like flipping and stuff:

The deep pit of foamies is probably a likely landing spot for vaults, jumps, or high bar work, but it also works for belly-flopping and wallowing:My favorite thing about the open play time is that, unlike most of the other activities for small children that we do regularly--storytime at the public library, Discovery Time at Wonderlab, puppet shows and teddy bear tea parties and such--I do NOT bring a book to open play. I wear my yoga pants and my sports bra, and I will happily wait in line with a bunch of three-year-olds for a turn on the giant trampoline. And that time that I got stuck in the pit of foamies and couldn't quite haul my own butt out and that stay-at-home dad laughed at me, I didn't even care.

Because by god, that pit of foamies RULEZ!!!

It's also funny to see how much braver my kids are than I am. Oh, how I long to fling myself from the top of the pommel horse like a cat on a sparrow:Will does any kind of leaping and daredevil work, but Syd seems especially fond of the balance beam these days:And of course, she's perfectly happy to swing for just as long as anyone is willing to push her:So, do they look like they're having fun, or what?

And we get to go back again on Friday!

Kids' Card Making: The Super-Simple Sticker Card

After playing around all they wanted to with the collage cards and the paper doll cards-- --the girls still had just a couple more cards that they needed to make for their Kids Craft Weekly Christmas card swap, so I pulled out the stickers:

I go back and forth on stickers--sometimes I hate them and think that they're wasteful and cause too much mess and aren't a creative tool, and other times I think that they're fun and portable and pretty mess-free and can be used quite creatively. My opinion on this depends, I think, on how many stickers we have in the house and, if we don't have any stickers in the house, how long it has been since we've had some.

The last time I bought foam stickers was last year during a big post-Halloween sale, I think, so there's been plenty of time for their absence to make my sticker-heart grow fonder. And I have been making it a habit (for a while, now, so hopefully it's not just a phase!) to be much more disciplined with the girls and with myself about keeping our environment neat and tidy--and boy, that's a lot of work, but it is nicer not to have sticker wrappers all over the house. Or uncapped markers. Or library books. Or whatever else I used to be too tired to keep up a constant hassle about.

However, with this last sticker purchase the stars aligned, and I bought a LOT. It was one of those Black Friday businesses when I was already at Michael's (I just happened to be there, you know, just to pick up a few things, only to find all these people standing in line just to get in the store! Weird!), and so their entire stock of foam stickers was marked down by 50%, and I had a coupon in hand for an additional 25% off of my total purchase, which meant that each of the sticker sets that I bought for the girls was $3, not including tax.

And that's why the girls have on their art shelves not just the Christmas set that they used to make their last Christmas cards, but, um, a dinosaur set, and an alphabet set, and an outer space set.

And in a month or so, when I am sick unto death of all these damn stickers again, I'll remember that at least I didn't buy the pirate set or the princess set. So there.

Just a Simple Photo of My Girls

The girls' Christmas cards (from their Kids Craft Weekly card swap) are in the mail right this minute, but the very last thing that we needed to do before sending them off was to take a photo of the girls to include with each card. Since neither girl is really up to writing a personal note in each card I thought it would be a nice way to bring them to life for these little recipients who have never met them--and I wanted to sneak in my blog's address, because you know how much I love attention.



I allotted two minutes right before it was time to walk out the door for school for this task--the girls are clean and dressed with hair and teeth brushed, and anyway, how long can it take to snap one decent, normal photo?The winner!
Now all that's left is managing the level of hysterical excitement until our own card swap cards start arriving in the mail.

Kids' Card Making: The Paper Doll Card

The cards for the girls' Kids Craft Weekly card swap are all finished up, and the monkeys are sitting at my feet right this minute writing up some semblance of a signature and holiday greeting (after one card, Willow abandoned her planned "Happy Christmas to all" as too time-consuming and began to make do, instead, with "Will"). When they're done with that, it's the momma's job snap a photo of the two angels looking angelic together and send it to the dadda, whose job it is to add my blog address to the bottom of the photo and print off ten color copies and bring them home to the babies, whose job it will be (with the momma's supervision) to stuff the envelopes and seal them, and then we'll all go off to mail them together.

I had planned to sneak in some geographical learnin' this week all about the places that the cards are going to--everywhere from Australia to Ohio--but I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll be unable to peel the children's eyes away from anything overtly CHRISTMAS!!! this month.

This set of paper doll cards was extremely time-consuming to make, but the girls LOVED it, and worked absorbedly on the activity until they'd run out of doll clothes, which I couldn't cut out from the Cricut as fast as they could glue, especially with all the turn-taking and choosing of scrapbook papers and outfit choices, etc. etc.

You can do this kind of card with any sort of homemade or boughten paper dolls, of course, but since the girls and I happen to be obsessed right now with our new Paper Dolls Dress-Up Cricut cartridge (bought for a song during a Michael's doorbuster, at least, and well worth it), that is of course what we used.

It's tricky to get exactly the right size of paper doll with the Cricut, however, if you're measuring by width, because the Cricut offers measurements only by length. For instance, I didn't particularly care how tall these paper dolls were, but I did need them to be a little less than 3.5" wide, because I wanted our cards to fit in standard envelopes. So I actually had to experiment a little with various heights until I discovered that a 5"-tall paper doll is just a smidge less than 3.5" wide. Fortunately, the girls were happy to take over my mis-fires.

The nice thing about the Cricut, however, is that once you know the height of your paper doll, you can just input that same measurement to cut out all the clothes and accessories that are proportionate to that doll, so I could use 5" for everything from the hairbow to the Christmas tree. I don't use that feature as often with the font catridges, because if I want a single lower-case p, I generally want that p to be exactly the size I want it, not proportionate to the upper case P that I'm not going to print, but with the paper dolls cartridge, it's an extremely useful feature.

I've been playing with using the Cricut cut-outs as templates for making paper dolls and clothes out of recycled papers like magazine pages or comic books, and I have some big plans of also using them as templates to cut out some things for the girls' big felt board, but these Christmas cards are all done with scrapbook paper:
I tried to plan for the cards to be at least winter-themed by asking the girls to choose clothes and things that someone would use in the winter. Sydney was really bad at this, but with her, you never can tell if she's not doing something because she doesn't understand the concept, or because she'd just rather do whatever the hell she wants--either way, it's an activity to repeat a few times. Will enjoyed that aspect of the game, however, and came up with some fun cards:

The card swap is for children of all ages, and whereas when the girls did their Artist Trading Card swap they were sorted into a group of age-mates, here I think that at least some of their partners are quite older than they are. For that reason, I did want the cards the girls' sent to be fairly neatly done and reasonable as Christmas cards, and so although I obviously didn't direct or criticize their work, I did sort the cards into a small stack for the swap, and a biiiiiig stack to send to our own family and friends.

Grandma Beck might better appreciate Sydney's card, which consists of about 40 items of doll clothes glued smack on top of one doll with a big mound of glue, which was then colored on, than some anonymous ten-year-old in Canada might.

When a three-year-old works for most of an hour on ANYTHING, I don't care what it ends up looking like--it's automatically a masterpiece.