HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

One thing about Halloween being on Sunday, at the very smack-end end of the week, is that you basically get to celebrate ALL. WEEK. LONG.

And we did:

We made yummy Halloween treaties:

 Can you tell that they're supposed to be Jack-o-Lanterns?

We ate yummy Halloween treaties at each of the THREE Halloween parties that we attended in three days:

You probably recognize every piece of Sydney's outfit, from the Salvation Army "handmade by grandma" dress to the $1 garage sale vintage necklace to the birthday crown. The girlies weren't super-inspired by costuming this year, so they cobbled themselves together a new costume from their dress-up stash for every Halloween event.

We attended Night of the Living Red with the IU men's basketball players, with trick-or-treating, contests, a scrimmage--

--enough free candy to keep a little girl entertained during the scrimmage--

--and a costume parade down on the court with the basketball players, broadcast on the Teletron:

We made even MORE Halloween treats:  

That's another Amelia Bedelia sheet cake, by the way, with pretty much three entire jars of sprinkles thrown on top of it.

We decorated the house all pretty and spooky:

 We made some healthy treats, just so that we could feel good about ourselves:

And then we had a party! Little friends made gak with us--

--were enthralled by the overhead projector--

--loved on all the play dough--

 --and, of course, helped us eat some of our many, MANY Halloween treats:

And here and there and in between, we made Jack-o-Lanterns out of felt and Jack-o-Lanterns out of paper and Jack-o-Lanterns out of pumpkins and even, for keeping for momma's posterity to make her sniffle bittersweetly in twenty or so years, Jack-o-lanterns out of funkins: 

Willow's is on the left and Sydney's is on the right, with their signature and the year on the back, and I don't care that Matt does beg me to think about ten years from now, when there will be 22 carved funkins to deal with, each baby IS going to make her own funkin Jack-o-lantern every single Halloween from now on.

And lordy, I didn't even talk about the neighborhood trick-or-treating!

Willow Bakes Amelia Bedelia's Cake

The kiddo loves to bake.
The nice thing about baking is that the recipes are generally rather simple, really. You don't have to use the stovetop, usually. Often, you don't have to even use an electric mixer. Most of the time nothing is timed until it goes into the oven. All this makes baking ideal for little kids to do independently--they can take as long as they want, they don't have to worry about burning themselves, they can build up their little arm muscles and practice their math skills.

Although Willow rarely wants to make a recipe a second time (she still talks about how much wooooork the French bread was, even though she didn't complain while she was making it), if she finds a new recipe that she wants to taste, she's pretty much always up for making it once. The other day, she read Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, and at the end of the book, Willow showed me that the author actually included the recipe for AMELIA'S PRIZE-WINNING CAKE!!!

It was very exciting, likely the easiest cake recipe that I have ever seen, and here's how it went:

First comes the flour. Notice how clean the table and the child look. That will not last:

Next, you add the sugar. Please note that child baking is NOT for the faint of heart--it took Willow over four minutes to measure out one cup of sugar. I thought that I was going to die:

The cocoa goes much better, as now Willow has a system, but Sydney also develops some alternate plans:

Then you mix the dry ingredients, and you, the audience, discover that I am, in fact, a mean and wily parent:

Shout-out to Pizza X! And also Willow grosses me out a little:

There were big plans afoot to ice the cake and frost it like a dinosaur, or maybe a castle, and to decorate it with cookies and candy obtained who knows where, but after enduring the agony of waiting for the cake to bake, and hearing me announce that we'd also have to wait for it to cool before we could decorate it...well, plans changed:

PERFECT cake.

Thanks, Amelia Bedelia!

Cloudy with a Chance of Screen Time

It was a GORGEOUS morning:

The sky was full of clouds, and the clouds raced across the sky, so that all you could do was stand with your head craned backwards and watch them:

 We took many photographs:

And then we ran around, chased all the rest of the leaves that were going to fall off the tree right that minute, and watched the amazing sky some more.

Then the tornado sirens began to wail, so we scurried inside and spent the rest of the morning watching Land Before Time in the basement.

This was also fun, it turned out.

Do Not Eat the Candy Corn

I know it looks delicious:

All white and orange and yummy:

It's true that crayons are non-toxic and all, but if you eat these--

--I'm pretty sure that your tummy would NOT be pleased:

You can check out my NON-EDIBLE candy corn crayons over at my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

And speaking of non-edible treats, my weekend post over at Crafting a Green World about sugar-free, eco-friendly Halloween treats has spawned a series of the meanest, most mean-hearted comments that I've gotten since I dared to declare that the tag "craftivism" shouldn't be tethered to one particular leaning. Apparently, I am stupid, all kids hate me, especially my own, and don't I know that all apples have razor blades hidden inside of them? If I wasn't making an effort to be all Power of Positive Thinking lately, I'd be deject that the mere possibility of a Halloween absent high fructose corn syrup and individual packaging could be met with such vicious negativity, but I AM making an effort to be all Power of Positive Thinking lately, so...

Yay, I'm getting so many comments on my blog post!

My opinions are out there in the webosphere, and the world has taken notice!

Next stop, Larry King Live!

And when I appear on his show, I will give him a festive Halloween pencil.

And maybe an apple.

Little Kid Kasparovs

Sure the babies still like dinosaurs and human evolution and their bicycles and Magic Tree House and My Little Pony and baking sweet treats and Nancy Drew and Halloween, but their latest obsession?

 
 
 
Willow would rather play with me (and one of these days soon she's going to kick my butt instead of it being the other way around), but Syd likes to play, too, so usually I pit the two girls against each other and I coach.

It makes for a WAY better game, frankly--both of those two little nuts are so crazy and unpredictable that they'll do anything, and they never pass up an opportunity to take a piece. Seriously, they might as well salt the earth when they're done, because they leave their battlefied BLOODY!

And I can't even describe the thrill as they race their pawns to the other side to get their queens again, only to have the queens attack each other the very next move--and goodbye, queens!

All I can say is thank goodness--the girls and I are taking a cross-country road trip in a couple of weeks, and before we leave, I am shifting some cash out of the food budget and buying us a travel chess set. Because we won't even notice that we're eating beans and rice AGAIN if we're playing an exciting game of chess over dinner...

Tutorial: Camera Strap Cover

I had a really cute intro to this, but when I got up a minute ago to put on my pajamas and pour the last layer of melted crayon on top of some candy corn crayons that I'm making, Sydney's cat Gracie came and rolled all over my keyboard. Not only did she delete my blog post, but she also then typed in qwekkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk on top of it so that my draft saved that way.

Anyway, pretend that there's a really cute intro right here.

This camera strap cover is the third iteration of this particular project, and I feel that I've finally nailed it. The cover is as long as the camera strap, but when you want to cinch the strap tighter, as I wear mine, then the cover will nicely ruffle along the entire length, also adding some padding so that you don't have to sew in bulky interfacing. The cover is also pieced from two pieces of fabric, because sewing two side seams keeps the cover lined up better with the camera strap that just one seam does.

To make a camera strap cover, you will need:

• fabric. I used vintage quilting cotton for my strap, but I had really wanted to use flannel, and I bet that fleece would work, too, or even felt. Choose a small, busy print.
• rotary cutter, ruler, and self-healing cutting mat
• sewing machine with thread that matches your fabric.

1. Measure your camera strap, then cut two identical pieces of fabric. Each piece of fabric will have the length of the camera strap length + 1", and the width of the camera strap width + 1", also:

2. Put the two pieces of fabric right sides together, then sew all the way down one long side:

3. Hem each short end:

4. With right sides together, sew down the other long side, to form yourself a nice, long tube.

5. Turn this tube right side out.

6. To put it on the camera, unfeed the camera strap from the camera, slide the cover onto it, then hook the strap back up to your camera. After you've adjusted the strap length, your new strap+cover will look something like this:

But this, I think, is how you'll generally see it:

Insert really cute concluding thoughts here.

A Picture of Me in the Nude

ME: What a wonderful picture, Sydney! Will you tell me about it?

SYDNEY: It's a picture of you, Momma, and you have none of your clothes on:



And also, I suspect that those aren't my arms...

A Pinback for the Holidays

King Kong Donkey Kong

Florida

Texas

Missouri

BLUE FISH

Indiana

And now I'm gonna go watch Fringe.

Family Tree

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is that the girls have the opportunity to explore whatever they want.

Think about it. Think about having the opportunity to explore anything. Would you learn vegan baking? Car maintenance? Yoga? Embroidery?

Perhaps, like my daughter, you'd get really, really good at Zoo Tycoon. Perhaps, also like her, you'd read every single Nancy Drew novel ever printed. Perhaps you and she could spend some time together studying another of her interests...

human evolution.

I did predict this somewhat--years ago I drew a learning map trying to discover where Willow's passion for dinosaurs would take her, although I didn't know about Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs then, either--but I'm confident that it, along with Nancy Drew and zoo engineering/animal husbandry, does not appear on many standard first-grade curriculums.

But it's apparently what first-graders do in our homeschool. We've had human evolution books, human evolution documentaries, human evolution web sites, and we spent a morning last week putting human evolution on our big basement timeline:

All the info comes from the Smithsonian web site, printed in color, cut out by me and the Sydmeister, and glued straight onto our wall:
 
 And then, of course, the Very Important Signpost:

If you'd like to add human evolution to your first-grade curriculum, here are some of our favorite resources...so far:

Books



Film

• Ape to Man from the History Channel
• Becoming Human from Nova
• The Human Family Tree from National Geographic
• Walking with Cavemen from the BBC

Web Site

• Interactive Human Evolution Timeline from the Smithsonian

And if I ever found a hundred dollars lying on the street, I'd get Willow's mitochondrial DNA tested to determine the migration paths that our ancestors took.

Look Up!

I'm pretty stoked about my roomy new linkbar. I'm adding permalinks to the appropriate categories as I happen upon them, and new categories whenever I get a minute to add them (About Me? Recipes? Top 10 Most Embarrassing Blog Posts?).

Feel free to suggest something that needs a permalink. You know how much I love you busybodies, you.

Pinback Photos Go Kaput

I'm still learning all about my new-to-me garage sale light tent. I tell you this to explain the following photo shoot:

Forty-nine photos, none of them usable, all because of the stinkin' glare. I didn't have that problem at all when I shot my previous pirate pinbacks, so more thinking and practice and thinking again is clearly required.

I hope it's nice weather again tomorrow...

Log Cabin

It's not a quilt. I haven't made a log cabin quilt in a coon's age. My goal is to make a log cabin denim quilt big enough to cover me and Matt in our nice warm bed, but considering that I haven't even found the time to photograph and list pinbacks, or my HALLOWEEN stuff, to my pumpkinbear etsy shop, much less sew the girls some nightgowns and myself some T-shirt panties and do the crazy thrifting required to finish collecting the Star Wars T-shirts that I need for Matt's quilt...

Yeah, enough about me. Last weekend, Willow mentioned that she wanted to make a "real" log cabin out of twigs. Syd and I gathered some fallen sticks around the yard, and then I sat down on the porch and broke the sticks into a big pile of roughly 6" pieces, and then promptly forgot about it. Don't worry--I can totally forget all about something even if I have to practically step over it to get in the house.

And yet, forgotten by me, there it still sat, apparently remembered by my daughter, and convenient enough for her to carry into the house one day after a bike ride, pile onto the living room table, and, using the glue gun already sitting there and ready to plug in (ahem...we use a lot of hot glue?), a log cabin came together:

 
 
 
 
Mid-way through, she stopped so that I could use the cut-off wheel on my Dremel to cut a door into the cabin, but I have no final shot to show you, as apparently the cabin still requires mud walls and, I'm not sure for what, but also "leaves."

How are the New Kittens Working out, Julie?

I'd say that they've made themselves quite at home.

Miniature Pillow, Proud Momma

Sydney was listening to an audiobook, and I was catching up on emails, requesting Ohio travel guides from the library, googling high-quality pdf images of the Titanic, uploading photos, reading a blog or two--you know, important stuff-when Willow appeared suddenly at my elbow and said that she wanted to make a little pillow.

Would I help her sew it?

WOULD I?!?

This is what every sewing parent waits for, isn't it? The day that your child appears at your elbow and desires to learn your skill? She doesn't want to spend her morning reading Nancy Drew! She wants ME to teach her how to sew!

I set Will loose among my fabric stash while I finished up a last email or two, and by the time she had decided on two 6.5" squares of novelty cotton (meant to be incorporated into a DIY I Spy Quilt Kit for Bazaar Bizarre, but oh, well...), we were ready to roll.

First, I had Willow arrange the squares right sides together, lined up perfectly, then I pinned them well inside the sewing path (anticipating some meanderings), and I drew Willow a sewing guide around the perimeter of the square, in a light blue fat marker:

For the first time, Willow sat in my sewing chair not on my lap, but all by herself. For the first time, she put her foot on the pedal. I showed her how to guide the fabric, how to backstitch, how to lower the needle and lift the presser foot to turn corners.

And off she went:

 
 
 
 
Thankfully, it was an excellent experience, with a pleasing result. I think that there's only one person prouder than I am of Willow's miniature pillow:

May everything she sews throughout her long, long life make her at least that happy.