Bugs...

Because I can't thoughtfully review a gorgeous-looking eco-friendly children's craft kit until my children have had the chance to see if they can wreck it, throw a fit over it, or use it to shoot their eyes out, I do occasionally get sent the odd freebie, such as this Artterro wool felt bug kit that I threw at Willow to see what she'd do with it.

Here's what she did, as a matter of fact:

Played with the wool felt shapes:

Hot glued some stuff together:

 
Did a little sewing:

Admired her work:

And did a little more sewing:

And yes, her fingernails are filthy. Finally had to trim them practically down to the nail bed to get them clean:

 
Cute as a bug?

 
Definitely nothing cuter than that bug-making baby!

You must now click yourself over to Crafting a Green World and enter the Artterro craft kit giveaway that I'm hosting. You can't win if you don't play!

Rainbow W.I.P.

Bazaar Bizarre Cleveland is in less than two weeks! I need the whole family's help to get ready in time, even, apparently, the help of those who might not seem traditionally helpful:

Walking too close to the iron and ensuring that I have to inform people that my products do NOT come from a cat-free home are important jobs, too, you know.

And thus stands my stack of cut fabric, ready to sew into rainbow sets of bean bags:

Add to this the additional cat duties of knocking over my fabric stacks if I leave them out, batting bobbins underneath shelves if I accidentally drop them, and scattering the dried beans if I leave the box open and unattended. They keep me tidy, those cats.

A Girl, Her Cat, a Book, and a Suspicious Amount of Rope

Otherwise known as your average, ordinary, typical, everyday Saturday afternoon.

China Unit Study: Tangrams

Will's interest in learning how to say a few words in Mandarin Chinese (and darn it all if I know where THAT interest came from) coincided neatly with a call for participants for our local homeschool group's international fair, so in our house for the past two or so months, China has been where it's at.

Yes, we did learn a few words in Mandarin Chinese (more on that another time!), but we've also spent our morning and afternoon projects learning about silk, kites, terracotta warriors, calligraphy, dragons, Buddhism, paper, rocketry, the abacus, fireworks, how to build The Great Wall, and other wonders of China. One of our most valuable projects, however, and one of the ones that I'll think we'll keep in heavy rotation even now that the International Fair's finished, was the tangrams.

Invented in China thousands of years ago, tangrams are a simple seven-piece picture puzzle, whose infinite combinations and tricky patterns have kept the girls (and me!) occupied for hours this summer. It's a sneaky little math manipulative, especially for Willow, who has gotten into the habit of exclaiming that she "hates" math, which isn't at all true, of course, for she adores all math activities when she doesn't know that they're math, such as the tangrams!

Using a PBS teacher handout on tangrams, I was able to make tangrams from scrapbook paper, at just about any size that I wanted. I also printed extra pages of the tangrams for the girls to color and cut out, and another copy of the tangrams page on an overhead transparency sheet:

The girls LOVE our overhead projector, so that was a hit, as always:

 Although my favorite part is the shadow theater that it inevitably produces:

I know a good deal when I see one, and I am ALWAYS on the hunt for homeschool supplies, so I'm not ashamed to tell you that it was years ago that I bought a complete and unused tangram-a-day calendar from Goodwill. The pages are unbound, the tangrams are magnetic, and it comes with a metal sheet that you put about five pages back from the page that you're working on, so that you can stand the calendar up and work on a vertical surface.

Of course, the tabletop also works well:

Although the girls had loads of fun making up their own tangram pictures--

--this calendar has a full year's worth of daily puzzles to complete. The next day's page has the solution to the previous page's puzzle, set up as the same picture in miniature, but with lines to show where each piece goes. That way, if you get a little stuck--

--you have some help!

Figuring out the puzzle is good for your brain, and pretty emotionally satisfying, too:

Making the tangrams and solving the tangram puzzles both nurture valuable math skills, so I personally suggest purchasing a tangram+puzzles set that has silhouettes on which you can place the tangrams (makes solving the puzzle more doable for a little), and also making your own tangram sets from a variety of materials.

Geometry in action! And the kid says that she doesn't like math...

Other tangram resources that we tried and loved:

• tangram games from the Sagwa the Chinese Cat PBS Kids site
• Ordinary Life Magic's shrink plastic tangrams

Hoping to Find Lauren Spierer

Normally, I just can't tell you enough about Bloomington.

I can tell you what it's like to cycle through the setting of Breaking Away. I can show you the house that they used in that film--it's a few blocks from my house, on the way to the library.

I can tell you how I used to lie on my stomach on the living room floor and watch the video of John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane":

The Tasty Freeze? It's actually called The Chocolate Moose--we also walk there pretty much every week for a moose horn and a couple of blizzards.

I can tell you how it felt to be in a crowd of people standing in a club here, standing right in front of the stage, in fact, singing along to the Old 97s' "Bloomington" just as loudly as they, themselves, were singing it.

I can tell you how it feels to go anywhere, anywhere at all in Bloomington and always, always know somebody there. And even if I don't know somebody personally, I know somebody that they know, and therefore I know all their business anyway.

Unfortunately, I also can tell you what it's like when a professor is murdered one Christmas, and what it's like to have my husband part of the jury that tried his murderer. Bloomington's a small town, you know? Professor Belton lived a block from my old house, in my old neighborhood. He entered the English department as I was leaving it, and many of my grad school friends were his friends. One of my mom friends knew him in a different context--he chatted with her and held her baby in his arms two nights before he was murdered. One of the other people invited to the party the night before his death, this party that was gone over and over and over again during the trial, is the owner of a downtown cafe, who walked in same fashion show that Syd was in.

See? Small town.

Stuff like that messes you up. You want to know that your town is safe, and not that a murderer walked right past the house that you once lived in with your baby daughter. You want to know that the friendly dude selling you organic salad greens at the farmer's market is not going to kill a friend of a friend. You want to know that your husband isn't going to have to be in the jury for a murder trial, and you don't know if he'll come home tonight because he can't leave until a verdict has been reached. Selfish little wants, I know, but you know that you want them, too.

I thought that I would have plenty of years to recover from that scary business, but now I can tell you more. I can tell you what it feels like to know that a pretty, petite, little college student disappeared off the street as she was walking home early one morning, just downtown. I can tell you what it feels like to see the posters all over town begging for information on her disappearance, to try to find a babysitter so that I can volunteer in the search party, to scan ditches and bushes and doorways for anything suspicious as I run my errands. I can tell you how Sydney's day camp is just across the street from Lauren Spierer's downtown apartment, and how navigating all those satellite trucks and police cars and reporters on camera just makes me so sad. I can tell you that I've already had the conversation with Willow, many times these past two weeks, about exactly what she will do to keep herself safe in college. I can even tell you, because this is Bloomington, after all, and I know everybody, that I know one of the "persons of interest" in Lauren Spierer's disappearance. These kids are all IU students--somebody had to teach them freshman comp, you know?

I want to tell you that this isn't my town that this happens in, not Bloomington, but of course that isn't true. Instead, I'll simply tell you this:

This is Lauren Spierer:

This is the link to download Lauren Spierer's flyer, so that you can display and pass it on.

This is a white truck that was seen circling the block near where she may have been at the time of her disappearance:

This is the number you can phone to give any information that you may have, completely anonymously:
1-800-THE-LOST.

This is something terrible that has happened in my town. If you can help us, please do.

A Fair of the Arts in June

I had a nice, long break for myself after last year's holiday markets, but on Saturday I celebrated my first craft fair of what will hopefully be a long and illustrious season:

It's nice and peaceful about a half-hour before the fair opens, when I've just about finished setting up. I had a prime location right by the fountain and miniature wading stream this month--I could sell my stuff and supervise the girls having a blast while getting wet.

Like my MUSIC sign? It's not backwards to the customers, you know! You can find my tutorial on vinyl record album stencils over at Crafting a Green World.

There's yet another craft fair application that I ought to be filling out this evening, but I'm tired, and the wren shouting at the cat outside the study window is driving me nuts, so I'm thinking that a beer and a re-read of HP1 is just the thing for tonight. Besides, what would a craft fair application be if it wasn't done at the last stinkin' minute?

It wouldn't be a craft fair application of mine, that's for sure!

Crayon Rocket Pops in the Pumpkin+Bear Etsy Shop

It took a while to figure out a consistent-enough color scheme that I felt that I didn't have to list each of these individually, but finally, just in time for summer when I really want to eat them, the crayon rocket pops have landed in my pumpkin+bear etsy shop:

At least they're listed, but I'm going to have to do another photo shoot with them to edit the listing. I know better than to photograph on an overcast day, and thusly I'm unsurprised about the greenish-yellow cast that I can't seem to edit out of the photos without ruining the colors of the crayon pops:

 
Willow, however, was happy to drag herself away from the seven-hour book and computer feast that it's been every day that Sydney's been away at day camp to help me out with some modeling:

 
I mentioned to Willow as she drew that these crayons would work really well for coin and leaf rubbings, and I was shocked to learn that she didn't remember ever doing those types of activities at all! Has it really been that long? Clearly, after we finish building the model rocket and the wooden dollhouse and dye the playsilks and tie-dye the socks, we have something else fun to add to our homeschool to-do list.

Homemade Laundry Soap Made from Homemade Soap

Willow's afternoon chore recently not only desperately needed doing, but was also sneakily educational, what with all that recipe reading and following and measurement taking, etc.:

I've posted the recipe and tutorial for my homemade laundry soap before over at Crafting a Green World, but this time I used only a little bit of grated Fels Naptha left over from the last time Will and I made this recipe, and for the remainder of grated bar soap that the recipe calls for I hand-grated some of my own hot-process bar soap:

I still have my doubts that a body soap bar will work as well as a laundry soap bar, but the price was right and I certainly have it in stock, and it does look and smell much sweeter than Fels Naptha in my pretty little Mason jar with the fabric on top:

Combine this with the fact that I finally discovered that Matt had been using at least double the proper amount of soap in the washing machine (on the rare occasions that he starts a load of laundry), and I do believe that we're once again all set for laundry soap for a good long while.

Always Time for Oobleck

Now that we've spent a year homeschooling, I've got some idea of tweaks that I'd like to make to how we go about it. Although we still primarily unschool, we also tend to have a few particular areas of study going on at any time, or a vacation or other event to prepare for with some learning activities, or, to be honest, there are just plenty of projects on my list that I want to try out with the girls for whatever reason.

Combine that with my suspicion that the girls could handle more daily chores than they currently perform (and my problem that I have more daily chores to perform than I can currently handle), and I've been playing with creating a workable daily schedule. It currently looks something like this:

• Morning chores (to be done after breakfast-ish and breakfast table clean-up)

1. Give cats fresh food and clean water in a clean water dish.
2. Clean your bedroom, including making the bed.
3. Brush your teeth and hair.

• Morning project. If we need to get something done, I'll assign it, or if we have an outing planned I'll call that our morning project, but otherwise the kids can pick a project or I'll offer suggestions.
• Extra chores. I give out extra chores as punishments, or if there's just something else that the kids need to do in a particular morning, then that's how life works sometimes.
• Afternoon chore. The girls don't have regular afternoon chores, so I assign, or they pick, something else that needs to be done, from sweeping the back deck to scrubbing the toilet (a task that Willow, inexplicably, loves).
• Afternoon project.
• Extras. Extras consist of anything else the girls would like to work into the day (such as buying ice cream!) to a scheduled playdate, or last-minute errand, or whatever, really.

There's no real timetable to the day, although this does need some improvement. If I need the girls to do a chore that they don't want to do, or if Willow is engrossed in a book or the computer, then getting the work done can be a big struggle, the struggle part being what I was trying to avoid by laying out the schedule in the first place.

Anyway, that gigantic preamble was all just to lead to what I wanted to tell you about, which is that Willow recently chose to make oobleck for her afternoon project, and once again I was reminded both of how much I absolutely love oobleck--

 
 
 
 
--and always, ever more clearly every single minute, how much I absolutely love that little kid:

Tutorial: Shaving Cream Puff Paint

Because obviously we need yet another art supply!

To make shaving cream puff paint, mix together equal parts shaving cream--

--and white glue:

Whip it together quite quickly, so that the shaving cream doesn't lose its fluff.

Next, whip in an amount of powdered tempera to your liking:

Just a small amount gets the whole cup of paint quite gorgeous and cheerful:

Oh, and it makes a huge mess. Mental note to hose it all off later:

Prepare all your colors in separate cups--

--and then have at it!

It's a little hard to tell in a photograph how dimensional the paint is, but you can tell, at least, that the cloud blobs in Sydney's painting will dry just as cloudy and blobby as she made them, even if you can't see the waves and turns in her sky:

This paint does not keep, so when you're done painting you have the pleasure of dumping all the paint colors out onto a giant newsprint and playing at marbling them for a while:

What with starting up the summer garden and prepping for next week's International Fair (not to mention next weekend's first craft fair of the season!) and experimenting with getting the girls into the habit of doing a goodly amount of chores every day, it seems as if we've been doing an awful lot of work stuff this past week, so it felt good just to dig in and play for a while. Once the chores are habit and the big events are past (although they do just keep popping up, don't they?), I'm confident that our routine will settle itself into an easier ebb and flow of work and play.

And shaving cream puff paint. Can't leave that off the schedule.

Their Summer Sport

Sydney enjoys a vastly larger variety of extracurricular activities than Willow does, so when Willow said that she'd like to take gymnastics I was stoked, and immediately punched weekly lessons into the homeschool budget. Fortunately, "Routine Day" happened to be scheduled for the week of their second lesson, so I was able to pass through the magic window into the Actual Gym to film the girls showing off their approximately 1.5 hours of instruction thus far:

All the other parents were very good sports at clapping for my two tumble girls, I should add, since their own kids' routines had probably been in the works since at least the beginning of the year, if not longer (one of the kids could actually do that backward flip thing). Still, I do believe (quite humbly) that Will did herself credit during her performance.

As for my Syd monkey, however:

She is obviously another Olympic gold medalist in the making.

The best part of Routine Day, however?

MEDALS!!! On the second day of class!!!

The girls were THRILLED. Will wore hers non-stop all weekend, to Arkansas and back, and neither child so much as questioned why they happened to deserve medals at their second lesson, but if there were any doubts in their minds about whether or not gymnastics was super-fun (it's a little warm in the gym, after all), those doubts were completely and utterly quelled for all time.

Because, for Pete's sake, in gymnastics you get MEDALS.

Our Homemade Modeling Beeswax

On a hot day in the early summer, it isn't quite so much of a chore to warm up the modeling beeswax by hand (other times, we immerse it in warm water)--

--and then to model it into something fabulous--

 
 
 
 
--like a fire-breathing dragon--

--crowned with wildflowers, of course:

Check out my homemade modeling beeswax tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Baked Banana Oatmeal

We have a lot of oatmeal. Lot. Of. It. And we love oatmeal, eat it for some meal or other (not nearly always breakfast) just about every other day.

I don't actually have a lot of instant oatmeal, however, because instant oatmeal isn't the cheapest where I shop, and so not only do I have to insure a clean pot before I begin (which sux), but I also have to hang out for something like 20 minutes just to get that dang oatmeal cooked (double sux).

I tried mixing up a big batch of overnight oatmeal to save time the next day, but this was so not a success that it wasn't even funny. The texture was just not okay to the children, and to children texture? It's everything.

This, however, was such a crazy success that it's also not even funny:

Baked banana oatmeal (it's not actually that yellow--the light in my kitchen on a rainy day is yet another thing that sux) is so stinkin' good that it's one of the few recipes in my repertoire that gets not double, not tripled, but quadrupled when I bake it. The only thing that I change about the recipe is the sugar--the recipe's author doesn't put any sugar in, because he is apparently some kind of sugar-free superhero. I, on the other hand, dust the top of the raw oatmeal mixture generously with organic turbinado sugar just before I put it into the oven. Cooking on top of the bananas and into the oatmeal, it comes out perfectly sweet.

Eat it hot, cold, or room temperature, and seriously, quadruple the recipe, because it's just that good.

Where Have I Been?

I've been in Arkansas, feeling unspeakably, incredibly, couldn't-be-prouder proud of a certain beloved baby cousin:

Watch out, because he's just about one second away from taking the world by storm.