The Sidewalk Chalk Fashion Show Runway

Don't laugh if you knew this already, but fashion shows are kinda complicated. You walk here, you pose for this long, you walk somewhere else, you pose, you walk fourteen other places and pose there, you look in the right direction, your face has the right expression, you don't watch your feet and also don't fall off the runway, you smile at the audience but ignore the emcee who's talking her head off about you while you're right there...

See? Complicated!

I don't know about the adult amateur and professional models who are participating in the fashion show, but my four-year-old needs plenty of practice.

Fortunately, we live just a few houses down from a fabulous park, and even more fortunately, we homeschool, and so we can visit this park during school hours.

Why is it so important that we go to the park during school hours?

Because during school hours it's just us and the toddlers at the park, and the toddlers don't play basketball.

While I drew a copy of the fashion show runway on the basketball court (a great quad exercise, by the way--at the gym later that night I climbed onto the elliptical, started up, and then was all, "Ow, ow, ow! Why does it feel like I've already exercised these muscles today?"), the girls added some decorations of their own:

Stegosaurus, by Willow

Bunnies, by Sydney

Sydney's bunnies were so awesome that Willow, upon seeing them, accused me of drawing them for Sydney, at which point Sydney then drew a few more just to demonstrate her bunny-drawing aptitude. Ahh, sisters!

In case you've never modeled in a fashion show before, here's what Syd's runway debut will look like:

She and another four-year-old, who will be modeling a dress crocheted from unraveled sweater yarn, will enter the runway together from the steps at stage right as soon as the stage manager motions them on. They will walk to upstage center and pose:

Willow invented this pose, by the way, and taught it to Sydney, and will teach it to Syd's partner at their next dress rehearsal. It's called the T Pose, and it's the one that I chose from all of Willow's possibilities--the P Pose, the H Pose, the W Pose (which involved the children each standing on one foot), etc.

The girls will then walk to center stage, turn completely to stage left and pose, and turn completely to stage right and pose:

They will walk downstage to the end of the runway and pose at downstage center:

They will walk all the way to downstage left and pose:

They will walk all the way to downstage right and pose. They will walk back to center stage and pose left and right again. They will walk back to their original mark at upstage center and face the audience again for a final pose (I'm having them blow a kiss, a tactic that I unabashedly stole from Toddlers and Tiaras). And then, and this is actually the trickiest part, they will exit not from the stairs they used to enter the stage, but from the stairs at stage left.

Wouldn't you want to practice that?

The Fashion Show Project: What to Do with a Broken Zipper

Minutes after a photo shoot, I say to my ham-handed, though ever helpful husband, "Please get Sydney out of her dress."

I'm busy fiddling with something else, so time passes, but when I finally turn back around to him, there he is, with his hand on the zipper to Sydney's Trashion/Refashion Show dress, and a look on his face that must be genetic, because I see it every day on the faces of our little girls when they are caught in the act of doing something very, very naughty.

"What?" I say.

"Um, the zipper," says Matt. "I broke it."
I don't know how he could have thought that pulling that hard was how the dress was supposed to unzip, but my man, he managed to break the zipper pull in half and rip it off of the zipper. Yikes.

Do I even have to mention to you that the very last thing in the world that I want to do is tear out the invisible zipper on that dress and sew a new one in? The VERY last thing in the world? Especially when, if I'm being completely honest with myself, I did make an error with my seam allowances and the dress is already just maybe a millimeter too snug for my liking?

Hmmm, hmmm. What to do? What to do? Thinking... Thinking...

Hell, the fashion show jury already thinks that my kid's outfit is too sexy. Might as well add a lace-up back to the mix!

I hate, hate, HATE my snap setter, which bends my snaps every time I try to set them. From what I've read, this particular snap setter does work for some people (though not for most, I wager), but it apparently takes a lot of practice and futzing and the reading of extra tips on line, which I do not currently have time for. However, it punches grommets like a dream, and so given a choice, I often make lace-up stuff, as in the following:

First you take off the rubber rings and use the pokey part of the tool to punch a hole in your fabric:

Trim away the bits of fabric that you just punched out, then set the eyelet or grommet in the hole, with the finished-looking flat side on the right side of the fabric and the pokey side poking through the hole into the wrong side:

 
Set up the pliers so that the flat side of the grommet is against the pokey side of the pliers, with the post going through the hole in the middle of the grommet, and squeeze the pliers together:

Perfect grommet!

What, you didn't want to see the finished dress, did you? Well, I'm not putting that dress back on the baby until fashion show dress rehearsal, so you're just going to have to wait.

Color Mixing Math

We don't study every subject every day. We don't study every subject every week. Take math, for instance. After the math grid obsession of several weeks ago, the girls didn't touch any purposeful math activity for weeks afterward.

Sure, they built with LEGOs and blocks. Sure, they did math games on Jump Start. Sure, they played Quirkle and Sorry and Monopoly Junior. Sure, they helped me mix and measure in the kitchen. That's all math. But neither girl felt like doing any traditional math exercises--no Cuisenaire rods, no pattern blocks, no worksheet pages, no abacus, no computation, no word problems. So we didn't.

Everything comes around, however, and if you give it time, everything gets done in its own time, and if you give a kid freedom and choices, eventually she'll choose everything. This I believe.

And that is to explain to you that we are now in the midst of a math renaissance. There are Cuisenaire rods. There are pattern blocks. There are worksheet pages. There is the abacus. There is computation. There are word problems.

There's a new computer math game that has the girls entranced (We're doing the free two-week trial of DreamBox, and so far it's a hit).

Will had me find and print different dot-to-dot puzzles from the internet, because her 1 to 100 dot-to-dot book has grown too familiar.

Sydney declared that Jump Start Preschool was "easy and boring, and I've played all the games," so up she goes, and she's now a kindergartner.

When the girls begin to make these kinds of choices, then I know to offer them more purposeful math activities as projects. I have an actual list, on account of I don't like to have ideas live only in my head. When a kid comes to me and wants to do something together, but she doesn't already have a project in mind, I read to her from the list.

4. Color mixing with food coloring and water.

To do this project, Sydney helped me drag every clean Mason jar out of the cabinet and fill it with water. To color the water, we didn't actually use food coloring, but the True Color Tablets from Steve Spangler Science, a Christmas present for the girls from their Grandma Beck.

We played with these tablets a LOT of ways:

I wrote out equations/recipes:

The girls had to follow the recipe to know what color answered the equation:

 
They also REALLY enjoyed making up their own complete equations:

 
 The tablets fizz as they release their color, so it's quite exciting to dump them in then watch to see what you've got:

 To write their equations, both girls wrote out the numbers, but had a lot of fun choosing just the right colored pencil and coloring a swatch instead of writing the color words:

Of course, then the project moved to just dumping in a bunch of color tablets and seeing what muddy dark colors they made, which I allowed this time just for the process of it, but the next time that I purchase the true color tablets I think I'll require them to limit themselves to no more than three tablets per glass jar--more than that, and the color gets too dark to tell what it is.

After every clean Mason jar in the house was filled with colored water, do you think that we just poured them all back out again?

No, we did not! I had a special project in mind for all that colored water, which I'll show you later...

Penguin, Bunny, Boy

The thing about making custom baby gowns is that every time I make one, I think, "Oh, my goodness, this is the most stinkin' cute baby gown that has ever existed on this Earth:"

The babies, themselves, are also pretty stinkin' cute, or so I hear.

Homemade Peanut Butter

Sydney has been so obsessed with peanut butter lately. Seriously--peanut butter toast for breakfast, peanut butter toast for lunch, peanut butter toast for snacks in between. Her little body must be craving the fat and the protein, because I can tell that she's in the middle of a growth spurt, but still, that's a two jar a week habit that the kid has!

To turn her love of spreadable legumes into a homeschool science project, I bought a bag full of raw peanuts from the bulk bin at the grocery store. Syd poured them into our blender, turned it on--

--gave it a good mixin'--

--and made peanut butter! If you don't own an overpowered blender like we do, you'll likely need to add some peanut oil to the mix to help it blend, but we could grind up a car in our blender if we wanted to.

Sadly, Sydney does not prefer our homemade peanut butter to the store-brand organic jarred peanut butter that I usually purchase. Even more sadly, I did not purchase any more jarred peanut butter during my last grocery run, since I knew we were going to make homemade peanut butter, and there's not another grocery trip in the budget until April, alas.

Ideally, Syd will develop a taste for the homemade stuff. She's also intrigued by my demonstration that with homemade peanut butter, you can blend yumminess in. Strawberry peanut butter, anyone?

I may have to get out the big guns and make honey peanut butter next. Maple syrup peanut butter?

Chocolate chip peanut butter.

Wheels

The world has a new bike rider, as my big girl Sydney, at four years and ten months, takes her first spin:

Watch out, world, because my baby has wheels!

The Science Behind the Butter

Willow explains the scientific principles behind Mason jar butter:

In case you wanted to know.

Tutorial: Heart-Shaped Cake

Matt was gone for five days earlier this week, to visit some old friends and attend a memorial for that dear child that I was telling you about. His absence coincided with what will ideally be the last of the unpleasant wintry weather that we'll see until next winter, and so our time without him wasn't what I'd call super-fun, exactly.

Sydney, acting out proven coping methods for her gender, requested that we bake a different sweet together just about every day. We baked muffins, and vegan cocoa fudge cookies, and, with pretty much the last dregs of the pantry supplies, a heart-shaped cake.

You can use any standard cake recipe for a heart-shaped cake. I used the 1-2-3-4 cake from The Art of Simple Food, with an absurd number of substitutions due to the oddness of our pantry (I try to shop only every other week now, due to the oddness of our budget, you could say, so it's typical for recipes to turn odd after a week or so). Let's see...I actually used the eggs that the recipe called for, even though I don't normally eat eggs, because Matt eats them and he wasn't home TO eat them. Instead of milk I used the rest of the organic cow's milk yogurt and then the rest of the soy yogurt--together they came to exactly the right amount, yay! Instead of cake flour I used organic, unbleached all-purpose flour. Instead of the butter I used the rest of the homemade Mason jar butter that the girls and I made earlier last week, and Earth Balance.

Phew!

Despite the way it sounds, the cake came out excellent--perhaps slightly on the dry side, which made it perfect for picking up and eating out of hand, which we all prefer, anyway.

The real trick to baking a heart-shaped cake is to divide the recipe, and bake the cake in both a square pan and a round pan:

The length of the side of the square pan should be equal to the diameter of the round pan, although it can be a little smaller, if you just don't have the right pans--for instance, I bake these cakes in a square 8" casserole dish and a round 9" cake pan. I'll show you how to trim the cake later if you do that.

The other option is to bake the square part of the cake in a rectangular cake pan and just cut it down, but that method wastes some cake, and this method won't.

Cut the round cake exactly in half:

Turn the square cake so that it's a diamond, with a point down and a point up. Put the flat side of each half-circle against one of the top sides of the diamond:

Heart-shaped cake! If the round cake was slightly larger than the square cake, then set each half-circle down independently, lined up correctly at the bottom, and trim the top straight up, the way that I did in the above photograph. If your round cake is the smaller one, though, you'll mess up all the proportions, so just don't do that.

I made a batch of vegan buttercream frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World--don't shame me, but I was almost out of Earth Balance and I didn't have cow's milk butter, so I used Crisco from the can that I'm saving to make soap with! I don't regret it, though--that icing was perfectly white and pure-looking, and took food coloring gorgeously. I divided the frosting and let the girls each choose two colors--Willow chose purple and green, and Sydney chose two colors of pink that were practically identical, and refused to let me darken either one even a little.

Then, basically, I got out of their way:

 
 
 A perfectly-decorated cake!

Obviously, you're meant to frost over the gaps in the cake so that they don't show, but I think that the way that the girls chose to decorate their cake was both charming...

And delicious:

And because it's really two cakes, there are plenty of leftovers!

Candlemakers

Willow and I have a new hobby to tell you about:

Candlemaking! Even though we'd never tried it before, I was confident enough that the girls would enjoy making rolled beeswax candles to buy some supplies in bulk from Knorr Beeswax. I figured that Sydney, my hands-on craft kid, would be the one to sit at the table for four hours in one day rolling beeswax candles, but I was surprised:

Syd hasn't touched the candlemaking supplies, but Willow apparently finds it a meditative, contemplative break from her immersive mental world (Matt and I call this "the Willowverse"), because she spent pratically an entire afternoon, and much of the evening, rolling out a huge variety of candles.

Well, of course someone had to sit with her and help out when she needed it (ahem), and so I ended up making quite a variety, myself:

I have a rolled beeswax candle tutorial up at Crafting a Green World, but they're really quite simple to make, even for little children. Willow found her niche in creating one particular size of two-toned candles so well that I encouraged her to consider making some to sell at our summer craft fairs:

"How much should I charge? One dollar?" she asked.

"Well," I said, "For every candle that you sell, I think that you should pay me $1 for the cost of the supplies, so you'll want to charge more than that, or you won't make a profit."

"Two dollars?"

"I think that people would pay more."

"Three dollars?"

"How about six dollars? Then, after you give me one dollar, you'd have..."

"Wow, five dollars!"

"And how about if you sold six candles?"

"Five...ten...fifteen...........thirty dollars! I'll buy some BeyBlades!"

"I'll drive you straight to the store."

There's still plenty of room for experimentation, however, as she then went on to make "the longest candle in the world":

And then the shortest:

I had thought that these beeswax sheets would be sort of a novelty craft supply, but I already need to order more! I'm thinking that we'll be doing more math with spiral forms this week.

They Look Better in Your Old Clothes Than You Do

After one custom order guinea pig (I hope you love it, Miranda!), I've decided to make custom T-shirt baby gowns a regular pumpkinbear etsy item:

I had been worried that I'd happen to receive an order in a week that was too stressful for sewing, but my last couple of weeks have been SUPER busy, and I've still been amazed at how much I can accomplish with just a few minutes of sewing here and there and whenever I can. I'm also keeping the custom orders down to one listing at a time, because if there is anything that I am not, it is a baby gown sewing sweat shoppe.

The Paparazzi Snaps Her Photo as She Reads

I needed a few photos of Willow reading, to accompany an article on the same subject that I'm submitting to Home Education Magazine. Our wintry weather isn't exactly conducive to reading picturesquely outdoors, so we retreated with the camera to the place we would have gone even if there hadn't been a photo shoot to do...

The library!

Although I took care to comb the child's hair (normally it's her responsibility, and I let her get away with just brushing the outer layer of that wavy/curly mop) and to dress her decently (unlike her sister, who will regularly screen at least two outfits before leaving the house, then will preen and dance and talk to herself in the mirror once she's in the chosen frock, Willow's habit is to pick the top item from her shirts drawer, the top item from her pants drawer, and to attempt to do away with underpants altogether), you will notice that I forgot to actually have Will remove her coat for these first few photos. As she normally does, she ran straight into the children's department and dove right into a book, and I merely followed and snapped photographs:

Will doesn't pose as naturally for the camera as Syd does, but this isn't a problem when taking photographs of her reading, since she doesn't even notice me hovering there, camera up to my face:

This allows me to creeeeeeeep in ever closer, until...

Got it!