Tutorial: Felted Wool Easter Eggs While You Wait

I must tell you that Willow and I are getting QUITE good at the guitar. We can do walking fingers, and Easter Bunny Gets Depressed After Easter, and tomorrow we are going to the music shop to buy music notebooks so that Will can do the rest of her guitar homework, which is to draw some quarter notes.

Will woke us up early this morning with her guitar practice, and it's a good thing that she got it done, too, for she has been sick AGAIN today. Thank goodness no barfing, because I don't think my nerves could handle another stomach bug so soon, but I am firmly against medicating a non-severe fever, and guess whose child of course gets hysterical every time she has a fever?

Fortunately, the child was placated with an endless supply of Mythbusters and Magic School Bus, and so I still had time to sew, and do laundry, and draw pictures with the baby, and cook a veggie chili that I distractedly made far too salty, and straighten the house, and read , and felt up some Easter eggs.

Felting with wool roving is one of the very few crafts that I do using new materials, and one of the very few activities of any sort that I do using animal products, and it's still not my favorite thing, frankly, but in a child's Easter basket it's non-plastic, non-sugary, non-factory-farmed chicken egg...and also colorful and soft and fun and suitable to be handed down to future generations of guitar-playing little girls, so there you go.

To felt your own Easter eggs, you will need:

• egg forms. After Easter, when I can pick them up for free at the Recycling Center, likely, I have plans to make felted wool shaker eggs with those awful plastic Easter eggs, but for these particular eggs, which I intend to be heirloom-quality for my children, I'm using wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products. I also have a fondness for their wood dinosaur cut-outs, if you must know.
• wool roving. I buy my roving from The Arts at Eagle's Find, where I am assured that the shop owner knows the happy sheep from which the wool came.
• hot water
• dish soap
• aluminum foil and a clothes dryer--just go with me on this for a bit

1. Cut off a goodly amount of roving--anywhere from twice to three times the size of your object, depending on how bulky it is: I always try to get by with a smaller amount of roving than I really need, but don't be like me--give yourself a generous amount of roving to work with.

2. Roll up your egg in your roving, trying not to have a bunch of the edges of the roving meet in the same place.

3. Get your roving-wrapped egg nice and saturated in the hot water and dish soap, and just sort of pat it down for a while. Pat, pat, pat all around the egg, gently working the roving into an even layer all over the egg. You don't want any spots that are too bulky, and you don't want any thin spots where the wood will peek through:
4. Keep doing this for a while, perhaps ten minutes or so, until the roving feels somewhat felted and holds itself around the egg. You can also rub, agitate, or roll the egg around in your hands--all that friction helps the roving felt.

5. When the roving is pretty well felted around the egg--it doesn't have to be perfect by any means--rinse out all of the dish soap, and then, while the egg is still soaking wet, wrap it snugly in some aluminum foil:I'm not a big fan of aluminum foil, either, but parchment paper and wax paper just didn't work. Aluminum foil works.

6. Throw the foil-wrapped eggs into your dryer along with a load of clothes, and dry everything on hot. The heat and agitation in the dryer will do an excellent job of completing the felting on your eggs, while you go do something else.

When you're done, your eggs will look something like this:
Aren't they cool? I think that I'm going to felt around most of the smaller eggs in our collection, and save the larger ones for decorating in other ways. Easter is coming up, after all, and we haven't gotten out the Sharpies or hot glue even once!

P.S. Want to follow along with all of our other handmade, homeschooling activities, tutorials, and resources? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Matt Does His Homework

Matt's mid-term for his drawing class consisted of...well, a drawing. Choosing something handy from around the house for his still life, he of COURSE ended up sketching a portrait of a stegosaurus:

There are several things that I love about this video:

• I love how Matt is wearing a sweater over a collared shirt. Isn't that adorable?
• I love how he's embarassed for about three seconds that I'm videotaping him, but then he almost immediately forgets about me and gets way into his drawing.
• I love that he's drawing a stegosaurus. We're going to hang it up in the girls' room when the instructor returns it. AND the instructor better not mark on it.
• I love most of all how the part that he's drawing just as I'm filming? Looks NOTHING like the parts that came before, and NOTHING like a stegosaurus.

And in other news, I also love that Matt bought me a guitar from a pawn shop, because I want to learn guitar along with Willow, whose first lesson is this afternoon. To borrow a compliment that my Mama once bestowed upon me after spending a week in the same house with me and a colic-y two-months-old Willow: that man has the patience of Job (pronounce it "Jobe").

Building the Courthouse Steps

Today we: 

• went to the library 
• ate homemade biscuits 
• checked out WAY too many books (again) 
• drew 
• read 
• played computer games 
• took Sydney to dance class 
• baked whole wheat hamburger buns and ate them with veggie burgers and baked potatoes

 In my scarce child-free time, I: 

• read 
• bought a guitar 
• made whole wheat hamburger bun dough 
• sewed and sewed and sewed more dinos 

The log cabin quilt is probably the easiest kind of quilt to sew, after the one-block quilt, of course, because it doesn't require a template. And if you're not way into precision (which I'm not), sketchy math skills just make it look better. 

The traditional log cabin block starts with a middle block that is a perfect square; since my middle block is made from the picture on the front of a T-shirt, however, my middle block is rarely a square. Here's how I start with that to build a Courthouse Steps log cabin block that IS perfectly square: 

1. You can save some time while piecing if you have some guidelines in mind and prep accordingly. For instance, although I'm building my blocks with strips of various lengths and widths, I know that I want each finished strip to be no wider than 1.5" and no longer than 12". When you add in the seam allowances, that means that my largest possible strip could be 2"x12.5". So I pre-cut every strip to that measurement, and just trim off what I don't need as I'm piecing. To save extra time, I also basically chose that 1.5" width just so that I could cut strips to the width of my 2" clear plastic ruler and not have to measure. 

2. You build a Courthouse Steps block with mirror-image symmetry, so that what you do to one side, you do to the other:
You do top and bottom, then left and right, then top and bottom again, taking turns to build up your block: Obviously, some of the pieces on the longer side will have to be trimmed to be narrower than 1.5", otherwise you won't be able to get to a perfect square AND have the same number of pieces added. When you're done with one block, repeat (can you figure out how I messed this one up?): And repeat again:

And then go do something else, because piecing gets tiresome.

Our First In-School Homeschool Field Trip

It's a little silly to be doing so much homeschool stuff while the girls are still, you know, in SCHOOL, but I do like figuring out some workable strategies and activities ahead of time, and I like that we're meeting other homeschooling families and getting the community vibe ahead of time, and the daily digest from the homeschooling group that we joined is always stocked with a TON of awesome stuff that we want to do! I've already had to miss out on a farm tour and two ski trips, so I was NOT going to miss out on this morning field trip to the IU Art Museum.

It's a great space, because the galleries are small and, in the mornings, at least, not very crowded--VERY important to kid-friendliness, because huge expanses seem to invite running in a way that smaller rooms do not, and it's much more relaxing to be able to hold a conversation without using your whisper voices. We enjoyed mosaics--
--and masks--

--and the guards here, unlike the guards in the Indianapolis Art Museum, for instance, were very friendly and approachable. I did get chastised, AGAIN, for taking a photograph (when will I learn about temporary exhibits?), but a couple of guards chatted with the girls, and one even came over to point out to Willow that, in her rambling little monologue about a sculpture she was examining, she had actually guessed its title--it was very Montessori-like, perhaps is why.

We did meet several other homeschoolers and their moms, but--and perhaps this is very homeschool-like?--as soon as we all entered the first gallery we scattered and I didn't see most of them again, at least on that trip. The organizer also handed us some pretty awesome scavenger hunt stuff, but--and perhaps this is very homeschool-like of us?--we basically just did our own thing with sketchbooks and photographs and wandering, and didn't do the hunt, at least that time.

But we did do the gift shop, of COURSE. One postcard for each person and, as an extra treat, an IU Art Museum coloring book--how cool is that?

I assure you, Sydney's representation of the museum is dead-on.

Working on the Dinos

Thank goodness! The SUN was out today! The sun was OUT today! The sun was out TODAY!!! And...wait for it...the temperature hit 55 degrees! Sitting outside for three hours on a park bench while the girls played, pushing the occasional swing, taking a little hike down the creek bed--this was exactly what I needed today. I then had the energy to do a load of dishes, and feed my children lunch, and straighten the study and the kitchen, and make dinner.

We had vegan beans and franks. I ate vegan beans and franks! I am DEFINITELY cured.

The timeline for my Craftster dinosaur swap has just this minute begun to seem very protracted. Um, why am I basically making three quilts at the same time? Well, because I want three dino quilts, and I'm not sure how much dino fabric I have to parcel out. Still, the dino deadline is fast approaching.

Here are the new dinos to add to the collection:

Yeah, that last one is crooked. I'll figure it out later.

Sydney Shines

Phew! Nothing like a nasty, mid-week stomach flu to take a person off of the grid for a while. No email, no Facebook, no housework, no book work, no craft work--it would be quite the refreshing break, if I didn't still feel about halfway this side of death.

Willow, fortunately, is fully recovered now, but she and I were both struck ill at almost exactly the same time, and were both VERY unhappy girls for a couple of days. Matt did as much as he could within his work deadlines, even skipping his drawing class when it became clear that I was NOT going to be able to cope, but Syd, my pampered, spoiled, sweet little baby of the family, was not only left to her own devices quite a bit (something that she is not used to, what with having a constant sister-in-crime at her disposal), but was also needed to help out quite a bit, and she made good.

While I was barely able to move, myself, in the next room, Sydney kept Willow supplied with water, dry cereal, Netflix, and plenty of snuggles:
I staggered into the room during one interlude to find Willow sound asleep leaning on Sydney, with Sydney still watching their movie and absent-mindedly stroking Willow's hair. When she saw me, she said, "Momma, can I get a blanket to keep Willow not cold?"

By Friday night, at least, Willow and I were well enough to be planted on the bleachers at the ice rink, holding each other up and swathed in blankets from home, while Matt handled all the preschooler-corralling so that Sydney could shine in another capacity:
The smallest skater in the Spring Ice Show may not have remembered her choreography, or consented to wear her costume (in the car later, Matt was baffled as to why Syd started to throw a tantrum when he tried to put on her duck outfit. I said, "I can guess. Sydney, was your costume pretty?" Sydney, from her carseat in the back, shouted, "NO!" Mystery solved), or even stayed upright for the entire time, but she does claim that she could see me in the darkened audience, waving frantically at her.

And I could not be prouder.

Today is Tuesday

Today:

I wandered bleary-eyed and fog-headed into the kitchen, whimpering for coffee, which my Matt made for me, because he is kind.

I set the girls up with a lemon reamer, two glasses, and a bowl of halved oranges past their prime on a table covered with newspaper. They were thrilled.

Thus, I was able to nearly finish my mug of coffee, and to read almost all of the newspaper, before being pestered.

I answered many emails, a chore that I find annoying.

By the time I finished, I had more emails in my inbox. I will ignore those until tomorrow morning.

I bullied the girls into clothes, packed a lunch, and off we went to the library.

Ms. Christina read LOTS of books, including . The girls have been singing "Zoli, zoli zoli!" all day long.

Ms. Christina also helped us make a drum from a can of coffee and half a balloon; a guitar from another can of coffee, three rubber bands, and a popsicle stick; and a telephone from two paper cups, a length of yarn, and a toothpick broken in half.

Lunch at the library consisted of an apple and carrot and cheese stick each, and a Ziplock bag of popcorn to share. A nice (and nosy, and lonely, likely) little old lady asked me if that was my childrens' snack, and when I told her that it was their lunch, she asked, "Oh, are you vegetarians?" What was I supposed to have brought--hot dogs? I just said yes, because I ALWAYS agree with strangers. It makes them stop talking to you sooner.

We came home with our own copy of Lizard's Song AND Lizard's Home. We have read them often since.

After dropping the girls off at school, I measured the width of the Parents' Library bookshelf, so that I can make it a beautiful sign. It is exactly two feet wide.

Matt blatantly stole Catching Fire from me, even though I'm the one who made him read The Hunger Games and requested the sequel from the library. So instead I'm reading the second Gregor the Overlander book. It's great. I read a couple of chapters while eating last night's leftover potato curry and injera bread. Teff flour=yum.

I do not want to do this, but I cleaned out the refrigerator while listening to podcasts. Gross. And we also have no food.

I uploaded some new favorite photos to my pumpkinbear Imagekind gallery, and spent WAY too long playing with previews. But doesn't my photo of Rose Hill Cemetery look extra nice on rag paper, with two mat boards, and an ornate metallic frame:
Yeah, that's $300 worth of nice.

Now, the greeting cards I could actually afford to buy for myself:
Isn't that cute? Now, who do I know who's going to turn four this spring?

I also uploaded some vintage Smurfs colorforms to my pumpkinbear etsy shop:I scanned these at a crazy-high dpi, and sometime in the future I have a date with these and the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop. And then I'm going to insert Papa Smurf into all my photos.

I picked the girls up from school, fed them granola bars, and chauffered them over to Sydney's rehearsal for the Spring Ice Show this Friday night. Her class is performing to "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." Sydney is going to be a duck.

Sydney fell down on the ice and threw a fit, so we got to leave early (secret yay!). At home, the girls played outside while I cooked macaroni and nutritional yeast nacho "cheez" from . LOVE that book.

Discovered that the girls had pulled chairs out onto the driveway, and were sitting and watching the traffic. Such cute little redneck kids.

Ate dinner, read books, went to the park after dark. The girls were beside themselves at the adventure of it all. See-sawed in the dark for a very long time, forced to alternate the Zoli Zoli song with See-Saw, Margery Daw. Secretly was listening to ipod at the same time.

Pajamas, toothbrushes, first chapter of Little House on the Prairie. New Moon soundtrack in the CD player.

In a moment, will fold and put away laundry while watching Grey Gardens. Will work on book proposal. Will wait for Matt to come home.

Or will just fall asleep.

WIP: The Dinosaur Log Cabin T-Shirt Quilt

That's an unfortunate mouthful. However, it is a T-shirt quilt--well, the center of each block is a T-shirt panel, with quilter's cotton prints pieced around it, so it's a kind of T-shirt quilt hybrid, perhaps:
And it is a log cabin pattern--Courthouse Steps, to be precise. It's not a perfectly traditional log cabin, because none of the pieces are necessarily the exact same width and I've not paid much attention to the values or the diagonal, etc. (you would not believe how difficult it was to figure out the simple math for this, although in our defense, when Matt and I were trying to work it out, we were enjoying a couple of nice glasses of sangria and we had two extra children running around the house--hence the sangria), but it is symmetrical:

And it is DEFINITELY dinosaurs. I can't even tell you how long I have been "working" on this quilt. I redid the pieces that I tried out originally, because they were awful, but I am super-proud of how everything is turning out this time. These hybrid blocks will likely be interspersed with log cabin blocks made solely of cotton prints, but I haven't gotten that far in my head yet.

I'm just going to roll with the momentum that I've got so far, and good luck that the whole damn thing doesn't get put away again for another year. Thank gawd the kid still loves dinosaurs!

Why We Brush Our Teeth

The littler little spent Saturday in bed, feverishly watching television, unhappily missing her Spring Ice Show rehearsal, and barfing every now and then for good measure, which left me and the bigger little to our own devices for most of the day.

Poor Will doesn't know what to do with herself without a sister-in-crime, so she got to have a LOT of Momma time (a little more Momma time than the Momma who's not used to having a bored kid hanging around her feet might necessarily prefer, ahem, but what's a Momma to do?). A LOT of board games:
A LOT of helping Momma sew:
A LITTLE bit of sewing on my own:And a LOT of time for long-lived science projects:Yep, it's your typical Egg in Vinegar project, but it's super-cool and was a huge hit in our family's five-and-a-half population bracket. Along with a couple of other projects that I haven't introduced yet, I used this project to demonstrate why we brush our teeth twice a day.

An eggshell has calcium in it, just like our bones and teeth do (Technically, an eggshell contains calcium carbonate--CaCo3 instead of Ca--but since calcium carbonate is used as a calcium dietary supplement I'm treating it as "calcium" for the sake of the kindergartner). Calcium is what makes our bones and teeth hard, and it's what makes the eggshell hard, too. Vinegar is an acid. Acids are also in juices and lots of foods. The vinegar's effect on the eggshell is a demonstration of the effect that acids also have on our teeth, if we don't brush those acids away very often.

You will need:

• egg
• glass cup or jar
• plenty of vinegar

1. Put an egg in a glass container.
2. Fill the rest of the container with vinegar.
3. Let the egg sit for several hours in the vinegar. We ended up letting the egg sit for about 18 hours, total, although Willow took the egg out periodically to play with it.
4. Pour out the vinegar--

--and notice how the acid in the vinegar has dissolved the calcium eggshell. Sure, the egg is bouncy, but Will didn't really make that much of this. She was mostly interested in handling the egg and looking at the mostly dissolved eggshell, and then she accidentally dropped it down the sink there and it's gone now, and I hope it doesn't clog the drain.

Willow LOVED this experiment. I let her repeat it again immediately, and she was able to set it up entirely by herself, and this time she set up TWO eggs in TWO glass jars, so I suppose that if one drops down the sink again, we'll still have a spare for bouncing.

Jersey Cotton Bias Tape is Even Easier than Regular Cotton Bias Tape

On account of it doesn't technically have to be bias tape. Bias tape is cut "on the bias," at a 45 degree angle in the fabric, for two reasons:

1. Cutting on the bias makes the tape stretchy, so that it can smoothly bend around curves and over corners.
2. Cutting on the bias makes the tape sturdy. Even if it wears down in a spot, at an angle it can't then split across the entire grain of the fabric, because it hasn't followed the grain.

But jersey cotton fabric is already stretchy enough to smoothly follow curves, so if you want to use it in a place where it won't get a ton of wear--NOT, for instance, as the bottom hem of a pair of pants, but YES, for instance, as the neckline hem of a gown intended for tiny babies who can't even roll over yet-- --then you can just cut your tape straight across the grain, allowing you to use up short widths of fabric that would otherwise be wasted.

Even though I own bias tape makers in a bounty of widths, if you're only making a short-ish length of tape--say, to hem the necklines and sleeves of two sock monkey baby bags--I, personally, think it's easiest just to make the tape by hand.

To make your own bias tape from scratch:

1. Figure out how wide you want the finished tape to be on the project. Multiply by four.
2. Cut your length of bias tape at that width multiplied by four. A large gridded cutting mat and a clear plastic ruler are very useful for this.
3. Fold the tape in half across its entire length and iron. Do this just a couple of inches at a time--it actually goes very quickly.
4. Open up the tape, making sure that you can see the crease down the middle, then fold each side of the tape in to that crease and iron. Again, do this just a couple of inches at a time, and do one side, then the other.

Does your tape look like this?Use it immediately, because the jersey cotton won't hold the crease for very long. But it is very forgiving to sew (and to wear!), which makes it one of my favorite fabrics.

Two More Babies in a Bag

These are the last two baby bags that I'll ever make from that awesome (and THRIFTED!!!) sock monkey jersey cotton sheet:
I can't believe it, but I have used nearly every inch of that fabric. Sydney has her sock monkeys skirt, and the last bit of it I must stow away to make something for Will. She's not so much a skirt kid, but I was thinking that if I waited until later this spring (which will come this year, right? Um, right?), I could sew her a very cute set of shorts or capris. Definitely bottoms, because otherwise how could she and her sister continue to match?

I tried a new technique with the hems for these particular baby bags. For the last batch, I blanket-stitched all the hems, which looks good, but I have to say that I may be even happier with these bound hems, made from the same fabric and zig-zagged:This kind of hem wouldn't be appropriate for the bags that are made entirely from T-shirts, as there likely wouldn't be enough leftover fabric to make the bias tape, but I'll do it again if I make another baby bag from plain jersey cotton fabric.

When I went into Barefoot Kids yesterday to drop off these bags, the owner, Scott, and I stood around and gossiped for a while like old women, as we are wont to do, while my girls sat on the floor and watched Sesame Street podcasts on my ipod (That ipod nano? Lifesaver!). I had drizzled sesame oil on my last three meals, at that point (at this point it's more like five, although not consecutively), and I kept being concerned that I somehow smelled like sesame. "Does it come out your pores like curry is said to?", I wondered to myself. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore and I blurted out to Scott, "Do I smell like sesame?"

He replied, "You smell really good, actually."

I joyfully exlaimed, "It's sesame!"

That is not really how I would recommend that YOU respond to a compliment, my friends.

Oobleck is Our Favorite Non-Newtonian Fluid

After spending a goodly amount of time exploring common, everyday non-Newtonian fluids, the next step is CLEARLY to make oobleck.

Oobleck is THE non-Newtonian fluid of all non-Newtonian fluids. It's solid and liquid, hard and soft, gross and awesome. To make your own solid/liquid, hard/soft, gross/awesome fluid, you will need water and cornstarch. And food coloring, if you're feeling fancy.

I wanted to revisit the spectrum of non-Newtonian fluids that we fiddled with the other day, so we started with a very thin solution of oobleck--two cups of water dyed green with 1/2 cup of cornstarch poured in----and worked our way to a thicker solution by increasing the amount of cornstarch by 1/2 cup:
The little kid was not, overall, a fan of the texture of the oobleck. She actually gagged a couple of times while feeling the thin solution, and though she played a little with the thick solution, she mostly enjoyed just spectating:

The big kid and I, however, had no problem digging right in:

For some reason (very scientific, I know), the cornstarch and water come together in exceptionally large chains of molecules. And so even though oobleck is a liquid, it's harder for the molecule chains to move around each other than it is for small molecule chains--it's crowded on that elevator, ya know? That's why if you move the oobleck slowly or let it rest, the molecule chains have more time to negotiate each other and thus they flow, but if you apply sudden force to the oobleck, the molecule chains just can't get out of your way fast enough, and so the oobleck behaves like a solid.

It makes for a wild sensory experience, let me tell you. You can actually feel the oobleck go from solid to liquid in your hands. You can grab a chunk of it from the bowl, and it's actually an object in your hands, but as you lift it into the air, it relaxes back into a liquid and flows through your fingers back into the bowl:

If you smack the oobleck with your hand, it's solid to the touch, but if you rest your hand gently on top of the oobleck, it will gently sink to the bottom of the bowl. Then you try to snatch your hand away--
--and you practically fling the oobleck bowl across the room.

Playing with the oobleck reminded me of when the kids were babies, and just the simple act of scooping water and letting it pour through their fingers was absolutely engrossing. Water was new then, and figuring it out was THRILLING. I really understood that as I, myself, spent close to an hour scooping oobleck and letting it pour through my fingers, absolutely engrossed, absolutely thrilled.

P.S. Interested in more hands-on science? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Art versus Craft: What it Means for Little People

I used to LOATHE the post-storytime craft activity at the public library. Every week, a few minutes after storytime, a librarian sets up some sort of reading-readiness project for the kids to do--stuff like coloring a picture of an apple tree and then gluing construction paper apples all over it, or making a paper bag puppet, or making a spider out of construction paper and pipe cleaners and hanging it from a coloring page web with yarn--you know the thing.

The thing is, though, that the projects are always very step-by-step, very procedural, and I'm very...not. I'm highly opposed to giving a child supplies and then telling her what to do with them, or showing her a finished project and instructing her how to do the same thing.

I'm all for establishment, such as "Let's listen to this Bob Marley CD and color how it makes us feel," or parameter-setting, such as "I want you to paint this picture frame for Uncle Chad," or even instruction, such as "Here's how to hold my expensive Micron pen. Don't push down too hard or you'll break it." And some stuff, such as my Jacquard fabric paints, is supervised VERY carefully when in use. But on the whole, I think that children's creativity is vastly more powerful than adult creativity, and I am strongly opposed to an unnecessary top-down, adult-controlled hindrance on that creativity.

In other words, unless it's absolutely necessary, don't tell a kid what to do.

The problem, however, is that Willow and Sydney LOVE these step-by-step craft projects. They always have. When each was under three years old I tried to shield her as much as possible from even knowing what the craft project was "supposed" to be--the resemblance of their paper plate "clocks" to the other children's paper plate clocks resided solely in their both being done on paper plates--but as they've grown more aware of the world around them and more adept at using the daily craft supplies of paper, glue, and scissors, they've come to adore this time. Witness:

They're making snowmen, of course, out of construction paper, paint stirrers, cotton balls, sticker dots, pom poms, markers, and glue sticks. I don't even know where to start.

It's been hard for me to even so much as resign myself to this kid's craft schlock, and I still don't enjoy it, but I do see how it holds value for the girls. Will, who has always been so much inside of herself, has always loved taking her completed project over to show Ms. Janet, who clearly loves each and every little child's project and enjoys discussing them in detail with each child. Sydney, who at times can barely settle herself long enough to eat a piece of toast, and who will fly off the handle if her sister bumps her arm in passing, will happily focus like nobody's business on any kind of project.

So it's interaction with a nurturing adult who is not their mother, and instruction following is important for developing logical ordering in thought and action, and...um?

And at least I don't have to worry that they will focus too much on making their projects look like the example:
Paint stirrers--who knew?

Science Fair: Observations of Ingredients--Non-Newtonian Fluids

I've been inspired by the Science Fair over at Ordinary Life Magic to put a little more science into the lives of my babies. The fact that it was difficult for me to come up with scientific concepts that the girls might have fun playing with tells me that we need to do this a LOT more often.

Remembering that mostly, however, the girls just like to play with stuff and get messy, this morning I set up a little project for them on the observation of primarily non-Newtonian fluids--i.e., I let them play with ketchup.

To do this project with two kids of about the same skill level, I put four similar substances, each on its own large, roomy plate, on the table. I wanted the girls to experiment with the viscosity of various non-Newtonian fluids (in preparation for making oobleck later), so I set out molasses, maple syrup, ketchup, and olive oil--the olive oil is a Newtonian fluid, so it's serving as the control, and also the yogurt and honey that I buy are too expensive for me to want to let the girls piddle around in them: I had each girl wet a dishtowel and put it next to her for wiping her hands on, and then I set each up on her own chair at the table, with two plates in front of her. I labeled a notecard for each girl for each substance, and I encouraged them to make observations, which I noted for them on the card.

I encouraged them to taste each fluid, which was a big hit with some substances-- --but not others.

I encouraged the girls to smell each substance, but I ended up not recording any observations about this since, alas, my poor babies have head colds and thus assured me that each substance smelled "like nothing, Momma."

I encouraged the girls to touch each substance, and recorded all their observations of sticky or slippery or smooth or yucky----but I really wanted them to make some subtle observations about each fluid's viscosity and its response to pressure, so I encouraged them to draw a picture in each substance and then tell me what happened. Both girls noticed that you couldn't draw a picture at all with the olive oil, that you could draw a picture with the maple syrup but it would "erase" right away, that a picture drawn with molasses would stay for a while and erase more slowly, and that a picture drawn in ketchup would stay forever: When each girl had finished her observations about the two substances in front of her, they switched chairs and observed the other girl's two substances.

The girls could have played with their non-Newtonian fluids all day (and licked maple syrup and ketchup off of their fingers ALL day), but after everything started looking well-licked and a little grody, I sent them off to wash their hands and faces REALLY well, and when they came back I set them to work drawing a picture of each substance on the front of its notecard.

Will's pictures were fairly true to life:

Sydney's pictures were HIGHLY interpretive:

The girls LOVED this project. They've already asked to do it again, and so tomorrow I'm thinking salt, and nutritional yeast, and brown sugar, and perhaps some weird spice that I'm ready to get rid of?

Little Kids Make Awesome Valentines

After the girls did their time making Valentines----their reward was to receive an ample supply of Valentines in return.

Montessori is probably a little different from many other schools, in that handmade Valentines are strongly encouraged (one is subject to militancy on many fronts when one's child is attending a fancy-pants private school--I also have to bring in homemade treats on the girls' birthday party days, and they can't have sugar, and if you try to send your kid to school in mittens that are too thin, you WILL get chastised). People are still allowed to be busy, so the girls always do get a store-bought Valentine or two in their bags (and one Valentine came with a piece of candy! I bet my life that the head teacher and at LEAST two sets of parents had a total fit about that one), but the beauty of the average preschooler's handmade Valentine really is a sight to behold.

Since this is Syd's first, and last, Montessori Valentine's Day, here are HER favorite handmade Valentines:

I also don't know if every little kid does this, or if the handmade factor makes them extra-special, but my girls TREASURE their Valentines. They carry them around, they pore over them, they painstakingly read/memorize each signature and greeting. For the last two years, Willow has literally loved her Valentines to death, and after some inevitable milk spill or bathtub accident I was left with absolutely zero momentos to hold onto for her.

This year, then, I'm afraid that in a few more days, before we've pushed our luck too far, the bags of Valentines will mysteriously disappear. They'll be rediscovered several years later in the girls' keepsake boxes, but I'll go to my grave denying any and all responsibility for the theft. The mystery, like the Valentines, will endure.