My Kid Went to California, and All I Got Was This Complete Set of ABC Bakers Girl Scout Cookies

ABC Bakers puts their Thin Mints in FOIL SLEEVES!

After a couple of long pandemic years, last month Will was finally able to achieve her dream of going to a sleepaway camp in the Girl Scouts of Northern California council. It wasn't the summer camp with surfing, ocean kayaking, and sleeping out on the beach that she'd originally wanted, but a just-as-magical winter camp up in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, with Sierra redwoods, snowshoes, sleds, and comfy cabins.

Before and after, she hung out with her grandparents, who indulged her OTHER two biggest California dreams: to spend a day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (a perennial dream, as she visits the Monterey Bay Aquarium almost every single time she visits California), and to buy the complete run of ABC Bakers Girl Scout cookies.

For those not involved in the Girl Scout Cookie War Machine, there are two different bakeries that make the Girl Scout cookies that the kids sell, and your local Girl Scout council works with one of those two bakeries. The bakeries are mostly the same--they both make a shortbread, a peanut butter and chocolate patty, a coconut and chocolate, a chocolate mint, a peanut butter sandwich, a lemon, and a caramel chocolate--but there are differences in the flavor and packaging even of those. And each bakery has a couple of different cookies, too. We're a Little Brownie Bakers council, and we have S'mores and Toffee Tastics. ABC Bakers has Toast Yays and Caramel Chocolate Chip.

Sell Girl Scout cookies for a couple of years, and you start to get curious about the other bakery's cookies, if for no other reason than customers--at least customers in a college town!--often come up to your cookie booth and ask the kids for cookies that are actually made by the other bakery. The kids learned early on to direct a customer asking for Caramel Delites to our Samoas, and a customer asking for Peanut Butter Patties got our Tagalongs. It's the same kind of skill set that a kid uses when a customer wants a cookie Girl Scouts stopped making a decade ago, or when a customer wants to know why cookies don't still cost a buck-forty like they used to when THEY were a kid. It expands a kid's worldview, and encourages them to contextualize their own experience in place and time.

So Will, who is currently selling Girl Scout cookies for her eighth (and final!) year, was STOKED to hit up a Girl Scout cookie booth in Monterey and bring me home a bunch of ABC Bakers cookies to try.

And because she is my child (and she's working on earning her Girl Scout Ambassador Photographer badge, which asks for a set of still life photos), we also took photos of them! 

Caramel Chocolate Chip is the ABC Bakers gluten-free cookie:

ABC Bakers Thin Mints have a pull-tab top!

They're also shaped differently, and the kids and I think that they're maybe a little crisper, more chocolatey, and slightly less minty:

Here are Toast-Yays!

They're meant to taste like French toast, and the cinnamon really comes through. The kids loved them, but I'm not a fan:

Lemonades resemble our Lemon-Ups, but the glaze is heavier:

Will LOVED the glaze and prefers these to Lemon-Ups. I thought the glaze had a weird aftertaste and I much prefer Lemon-Ups:

The Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies, are, other than the pull tab on the box, identical to Do-Si-Does:

Based on the serving size and number of cookies in the box, though, they must be a different size, but we couldn't see how:

We thought the Caramel DeLites looked a little different from Samoas, but they tasted the same:

Adventurefuls are the new cookie this year for both bakeries. Little Brownie Bakers is having major supply chain issues this year and couldn't stock us past our troop's initial order, so people in our council barely got a taste, and I'm impressed that Will was able to score this ABC Bakers box!

Again, they're slightly different from Little Brownie Bakers' Adventurefuls, and I slightly prefer these:

Peanut Butter Patties are indistinguishable from Tagalongs:

Comparing these cookies was such a fun project, and I'm glad it was one more dream that Will could realize before she graduates high school. Our last Girl Scout cookie season together is almost over--only 47 boxes left to reach her all-time biggest goal of 2,000 boxes sold! I've already got the photo I took of her first-ever Girl Scout cookie booth standing ready, so I can set it side-by-side with the photo I'll take this week of her last-ever Girl Scout cookie booth. 

If that second photo is blurry it's because YOU'RE crying, not me! 

The DIY Felt Peeps Bunnies in the Kids' Easter Baskets

Does the Easter Bunny like to put something homemade in your kids' Easter baskets? 

In my house, sometimes the Easter Bunny does not, because the Easter Bunny is busy. Sometimes, however, the Easter Bunny makes a pair of comfy shorts, or a hooded towel, or a cupcake pincushion. This year, the Easter Bunny is thinking about zippered pencil cases.

Last year, however, the Easter Bunny quite outdid herself, if I do say so myself!

I normally don't love hand-sewing, but I've found myself doing a lot more of it over the past year, as I've wanted to make things that require it. I finally mastered the ladder stitch--actually, I mastered that ALSO for Easter crafts!--and my desire to make stuffed Peeps Bunnies for the kids, and my firm belief that they would only look as cute as possible when made from felt and embroidery floss, is what led me to finally mastering the blanket stitch.

I didn't want to master the French knot on top of that, so first I tried button eyes and a nose:

That was a big nope!

I never did actually master the actual French knot, but I somehow muddled something that results in a similar cuteness level:

Here's the template that I used for my felt Peeps Bunnies. To make the stuffie, cut out two bunnies, then a super long 2" wide strip of felt. You could, of course, figure out the exact length you need by measuring the perimeter of your bunny, but it also works to simply start sewing it on and cut it off when you're back to your starting place. 

Embroider on the bunny's eyes and nose, and use a complementary color of embroidery floss to blanket stitch everything together. Stuff the bunny full of cotton, then finish blanket stitching it closed.

Your felt Peeps Bunny is best introduced in an Easter basket chock-full of candy and little presents, and afterwards in a teenager's bedroom, perched on a nightstand next to her bed, looking adorable and always up for a cuddle.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Mardi Gras Unit Study for Homeschooled High Schoolers: Year Two

Last year, Syd was stuck doing public school busywork while Will and I thoroughly enjoyed our Mardi Gras unit study. This year, Will spent a week in California visiting her grandparents and attending Girl Scout camp at just the perfect time for Syd to have HER turn at this super fun cross-curricular unit.

Whether homeschoolers are little or big, social studies is always fun and valuable, building context, familiarity with diversity, and geographic awareness. Mardi Gras is an especially terrific unit study because it's celebrated in many areas worldwide, but differently in each of these places. In this unit, we studied celebrations in New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Venice, Italy. There was plenty of room, as well, for conversations about other interesting place- and religion-related topics, and there are a ton more connections for cooking, history, environmental studies, and any of the other billion wonderful topics that come up when a teenager and her mom are hanging out and making king cake.

We did all the activities in my lesson plans, but, unsurprisingly if you know Syd, her focus was on the baking.

For some seriously old-school vibes, Syd and I listened to this classic while she worked:

• Carnival at Candlelight

How long has it been since we've listened to a Magic Tree House book for genuine enjoyment? High Tide in Hawaii, maybe? Regardless, we've just discovered that the newest book requires Jack and Annie to climb Machu Picchu and rescue a baby llama... so obviously I requested it from the library. Time for a Family Read-Aloud Throwback Night!

When we weren't listening to a children's book that we've already listened to 400 times in the past decade, we've been listening to a lot of local radio stations off and on for their Carnival music. 

Here are some good New Orleans stations:

• 98.9 Dolphin Radio
• 1590 AM WKKAY

Here are some good Rio de Janeiro stations:

• Radio Batuta MPB
• Bike Web Radio
• FM o Dia 1005.

There are over a hundred radio stations in Rio de Janeiro!

Here are some good Venice radio stations:

• Radio Onda 1
• Radio Ca' Foscari

Syd's beautiful king cake did not look this pristine for long:

Matt ate the last piece for breakfast this morning, which was as good a way as any to celebrate Fat Tuesday!

Girl Scout My Little Pony Fun Patch and Watch Party, Because Teenagers are Still Babies

 

We have come a LONG way from that one time, 13 years ago, that I spent an entire day trying to distract my four-year-old away from her desire to just watch a freaking My Little Pony cartoon, for pete's sake.

I literally cannot make it any clearer to you that I have no chill, and have never had even the slightest amount of chill, than by having you read that blog post.

Or possibly it just illustrates the fact that I spoil the snot out of Syd, because not only did she watch so much Land before Time at that exact age that I eventually had to start cutting her off ONLY because she started talking like Ducky all the time and I was worried she'd need speech therapy, but also, literally yesterday, she and I played a game where I started reading the plot summaries of a random Land before Time movie, and she'd stop me when she remembered the rest of the plot.

I tell you what, those eggnappers were bad news!!!

And we have since seen every single episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and we have the soundtracks as part of our Spotify rotation, AND we watched the movie--in an actual theater!

My kids were clearly not the only ones who were My Little Pony superfans, because when this limited edition fun patch for the most recent Netflix movie came out, several of my Girl Scouts wanted one. Nostalgia is a happy emotion, and I love seeing kids who aren't too cool for their childhood pleasures!

The suggested activities for earning the fun patch are of course WAY too babyish for teenagers, so we satisfied ourselves by watching that My Little Pony movie (yes to a whole month of Netflix!!!), and engaging in a few My Little Pony-adjacent activities.

Here are some of those My Little Pony-adjacent activities, all quite suitable for the nostalgic teenager:

• Perler beads. Really, any fan art will do, but Perler beads are very suitable for teenagers, and many of them like fiddly little activities they can do with their hands while chatting. I also highly recommend shrink plastic, either printed with images you've grabbed off Google that they can color, or photocopied with graphics from the billion My Little Pony coloring books, activity books, and early reader books at the thrift store.
• stickers and temporary tattoos. Draw your own (have you heard the gospel of water-slide paper?!?) or print graphics like these cutie marks.
  
• DIY plushies. This is way too much work to do with a group of kids, but it would also be a good project to hand-sew in felt and embroidery floss, if you had a teenager or two who wanted to learn that skill.
• party food. Ignore the fact that this blog post with all the awesome party food is for a My Little Pony party for a THREE-YEAR-OLD. Ahem. The beauty of having a retro MLP party with teenagers is that THEY can make all the food! Everybody can sign up to bring something, or you can choose all the recipes and buy all the ingredients ahead of time, and let making the food be one of the activities.
• cake cones. One year, Syd had a fairy tale party complete with a castle cake that she decorated herself. Bizarrely, the most popular parts of this castle cake were the waffle and sugar cones she'd coated in canned frosting. The kids mowed down those frosted cones--they might even have pulled the leftovers out of the pantry and frosted and eaten them, too! It was a sleepover that I'm pretty sure nobody slept at. So I think these My Little Pony-themed cones would be pretty popular to make and eat!
• upcycled toys. It would be super cute to have the kids bring some old MLP toys they wouldn't mind parting with, then letting them upcycle them into fun, new creations. Here's an easy snow globe to start with!

Because one of the greatest lessons that you can teach a teenager is how to throw an awesome retro party!

Breaking News: Our House is a Disaster

OMG you guys, I have been so discombobulated for this entire year so far!

Right at the beginning of the year, it was finally our turn with the construction crew Matt had first contacted back in... oh, March 2020 or so. Turns out that EVERYONE felt like a global pandemic was a great time to get those nagging home renovation issues taken care of! 

We desperately needed to have our main shower retiled, and it turned out when they finally demolished the shower that we ALSO desperately needed to have several joists, several walls, and the floor in three different rooms replaced because that shower had also apparently been leaking into our subfloor for years.

Here's what your house will look like if your shower's been leaking for eight years!

The joists look like they've been through a fire, and they were about as structurally stable.

The head guy, showing me those joists rotted through with mold, said, "I'm surprised you're not constantly sick!"

Fun fact: I AM kind of constantly sick? Although lately my nagging cough has been a LOT better, ahem...

So now we get to have not only a new shower, but also a new closet floor, new bathroom floor, new family room floor, and new drywall in all those rooms, too. And if we're going to have new drywall, we might as well paint. And if we're painting and getting new flooring... well, we HAVE been wanting a new giant couch for several years now.

It's definitely a yay, because we've been living with the previous homeowner's 1980's-era tile, carpet, vinyl laminate, and dingy white wall paint since we moved in. And that couch used to live in a dorm lounge. So, you know, it's always fun to upgrade to stuff that's more one's taste, I guess.

Except if you know me, then you know that's not actually fun for me. The presence of the construction crew, the mess, the need to pick out and purchase new stuff, the drop cloths and stacks of tiles and non-functioning amenities are really getting to me, and I fervently look forward to one day being once again in my own put-together home without strangers.

Currently, the family room floor is done, with solid bamboo installed on top of our gross old vinyl:

Yes, that's Syd mopping the walls, because a clean room with new flooring made us suddenly notice that there are cobwebs all over the tops of our walls. Does everyone periodically mop their walls, and this is yet another piece of home training that passed me by?

And for some reason I noticed just last night that the workers who installed the floor also nailed our front door shut? You can actually see the board in that above photo! I need to add this to my list of random crap to ask them about.

Also, the bamboo floor is no longer nearly that clean. I don't know if it's always going to show dirt like crazy, or if it's just because I've got construction workers tromping through all day every day, or if it only feels like it shows dirt like crazy because the one good thing about the gross old vinyl floor is that it NEVER showed dirt so maybe I'm just used to being filthy.

These are the two walls we're going to repaint:

Syd suggested burgundy, and I was all, "Yeah, that sounds cool," because I don't know or care about wall color and just didn't want to have to make a decision myself, but Matt does NOT think burgundy is a good idea and so has promised me that he'll take some photos of the room and Photoshop wall colors onto it so we can see what looks good.

It probably won't be burgundy...

Here's the shower tile coming together:

Thank gawd for Matt, who is interested and detail-oriented and design-savvy so all I had to do was follow him around Menard's and be bored while he picked out beautiful tile for us.

Our tile guy, whom I call Tyler in my head and I'm going to be SO embarrassed when I inevitably call him Tyler to his face one day since that's not his name, leaves his empty Skoal cans lying around his work area:

I stole one the other day, intending to clean it and make a cute craft out of it, but when I opened it the lingering--not even lingering. Overpowering? Noxious? Amber waves?--of Wintergreen Skoal fumes about knocked me on my butt. Seriously, just remembering the smell makes me feel like gagging. I held my breath while submerging the empty can halves in bleach water and then left them there for a day, but I swore I could still smell it when I rinsed them off, and anyway, the can is just plastic, not metal like I'd first thought, so I dumped it.

Tyler is, nevertheless, my favorite construction guy, because unlike the other guys, who are gregarious and pleasant and make small talk, Tyler just minds his business, coming and going without fanfare. I unlock the door for him when I get up in the morning, and he lets himself in without a word when he arrives, then leaves without a word eight or so hours later. I have even almost forgiven him for this:

That photo is Tyler, having left for the day without a word, locking me out of the bathroom. Which would be fine, even though I really miss that toilet and sink when they're gone, except that my clothes closet and my homeschool closet are both on the other side of the bathroom. The kids were able to bravely soldier on without the homeschool supplies I wanted for them, ahem, but I needed my CLOTHES! My socks! My underwear! My best hoodie! My comfiest jammy pants! All locked away without warning, along with my heartburn medicine and hair ties and tampons!

And Tyler has done that TWICE so far.

It's for a good cause, though, because check out what he installed underneath our tile:

It's gonna be one of them fancy underfloor radiant heating things so my precious toesies don't get cold without that 1980s bathroom carpet underfoot!

And here's Matt floor-is-lava-ing something I absolutely HAD to have from the homeschool closet:

You guys, I don't even KNOW the timeline for when this crew is going to be finished, and even then Matt and I have to paint and I'm trying to talk him into calling an electrician to put more outlets into the family room because I read an online article that scared the snot out of me on the subject of power strips and extension cords, and the other day I caught him showing the contractor the kids' bathroom and planning for Tyler to retile it, too, and how many rotten joists do you think there are under THAT floor, and if they're retiling it we might as well replace the sink and the toilet and WHEN WILL THIS END?!?!?!?

Just... send soothing thoughts my way, and ocean sounds mixtapes, and frozen pizzas, and links to flexible shared workplaces.

Homeschool Astronomy: How Does A Color Filter Affect the Temperature of Light Refracted through a Prism?

 Here's my biggest homeschool tip: never get rid of your homeschool stuff!

Big kids may not use those sweet sensory materials and basic manipulatives the way that they did when they were little, sure, and all that stuff from the early years may sit in your closet for a distressingly long time, but every now and then these big kids DO need that stuff, and it's awfully nice to have it. We've repurposed all kinds of the kids' early learning stuff into our homeschool high school, from the map puzzles that I dragged back out when Will was studying AP Human Geography, to the Base 10 blocks that helped the kids wrap their heads around binary during our Robotics and Programming study, to the beakers and balance scale that helped the kids understand mass and volume that we now use in science labs.

For this Honors Astronomy lab, Will repurposed the colored cellophane that I bought back in 2015 when the kids were going through a phase of having big interests in color theory (we did ALL the color wheels and color mixing and color filter stuff! It was so fun!). She also used a set of glass prisms that I WISH I'd bought back when my little learners were super interested in rainbows, dang it, and an infrared thermometer that I bought in 2014, after seeing the one that Will used to earn her Junior Scientist badge at Yellowstone. 

By this time, we'd played around quite a lot with prisms and their angles of refraction, and how a color filter might affect the dispersal of light, etc. So when I challenged Will to create her own experiment involving prisms, she thought it would be interesting to investigate how a color filter might affect the temperature of each color of refracted light from a prism.

I love the way that this experiment flows so naturally from her prior explorations. To make this lab work, she needed to know the prism shape that would give her the widest spread of individual colors, and have that experience of measuring the temperatures of each color, and noticing how a color filter affects the refracted rainbow.

If we'd owned these prisms throughout her childhood, that's probably information that she would have already picked up through sensory play and simpler experiments, and who knows how sophisticated her lab ideas would be now?

It's surprising how many astronomy labs a kid can complete right on her own back deck!

Will's got a few more labs that she ought to do to finish up her lab notebooks for a couple of her science studies (the goal for a high school lab science course is at least ten labs), and now I'm trying to think of more ways to use this awesome colored cellophane in experiments. 

Maybe she can grow bean sprouts under colored light for AP Environmental Science? 

P.S. Interested in more of the hijinks involved in homeschooling two high schoolers? Follow along in my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How-to: DIY Color Viewers

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World in 2015.

Got a kid who's in love with color? These DIY color viewers will help her see the world in a whole new light! 

These color viewers are a project that is suitable for a wide range of ages. Toddlers and preschoolers will incorporate them into their sensory play, while older kids (who do still love their sensory play, of course!) will be able to use them for a variety of scientific observations and experiments--colored shadows, color mixing, the properties of light, the properties of the eye, etc. 

 Also? They're just plain fun! 

 Here's how to make your own set of color viewers: 

  1. Gather ample cardboard to upcycle. You'll need two pieces of cardboard for each color viewer. I have a horrifying collection of used shipping boxes that I was pretty thrilled to raid for this project, but cereal or cracker boxes, moving boxes, or my most common go-to, cardboard record album covers, will also work well. 

  2. Cut cardboard to size. This size will depend on the size of the cardboard pieces that you're using; to minimize waste, I cut my cardboard to the largest size that I could--about 5.25"x8.5". Cut two pieces for every color viewer that you want to make. 

  3. Cut a window into the cardboard. Measure 1" in on all sides, and cut out to make a frame. 

  4. Cut the cellophane to size. As with my DIY 3D glasses tutorial, it's the colored cellophane that really makes this project. Measure the window that you've cut into the cardboard, then cut each piece of cellophane, one per color viewer, 1" longer than that measurement by both length and width. 

  5. Glue the cellophane to one cardboard frame. Lay one cardboard frame wrong-side-up (for instance, I put the outsides of my scuffed and labeled shipping boxes to the inside of my viewers), then run a line of hot glue along the entire perimeter of the window. Carefully center and set the cellophane down over the window, and press in place. 

  6. Glue the second cardboard frame to the first. Run another line of hot glue around the frame, then center a second cardboard frame and set it down on top of the first, right-side-up. These color viewers are sturdy enough for even toddler play, but if you've got a smaller kid who still likes to gnaw, you'll probably want to cover the outside edges of the cardboard frame with clear packing tape so that the kid's saliva doesn't soften and wear away the cardboard. 

Older kids will mostly do this, though: 

 Then she looked at her sister through it, informed her that she was green and therefore made of puke, the sister screamed in outrage and began to chase her, and I might have possibly gone inside and locked the door.

A Skeleton Mermaid Tail Snuggle Sack, For She Who Contains Multitudes

 

A few years ago, I sewed each of the kids one of those snuggle sacks that were super trendy at the moment. You know the ones that are like lap blankets but also sleeping bags... sleeping bags for your legs, I guess? They're perfect for all those times when you want a comfy blanket but you also want your hands free for snacks and a book.

I used two layers of thick fleece for my snuggle snacks, and Matt made the patterns for me. Will got a giant fleece shark, complete with a pelvic fin and both dorsal fins, and large enough that she could use it as a sleeping bag, if she wants. It's quite amusing to walk through the family room and see her kicked back reading on the couch, half-consumed by a giant fleece shark.

Syd got a mermaid tail (it was the Year of Mermaids, you might recall), but I purposefully made hers a little shorter, because you obviously can't be swallowed up to your smile by a mermaid tail! It can go up to the small of your back, max--any further and people wouldn't glimpse you and accidentally assume that you're a real mermaid. So Syd's mermaid tail snuggle sack was perfectly Syd-sized, with mermaid scale fleece on the outside, and she looked like a real mermaid that whole winter every time she wore it.

And then she hit a growth spurt, and by the next winter her mermaid tail snuggle sack was about a foot too short.

Back when I sewed those first snuggle sacks, I'd had another idea for a snuggle sack that wasn't quite right for my littler kid who loved mermaids sincerely and intensely, nor for my bigger kid who liked dark stuff, but liked sharks even better.

It turned out, though, that my other idea was absolutely perfect for a kid who has grown up a few years and now loves both mermaids AND dark stuff.

Finally, the world is ready for my skeleton mermaid tail snuggle sack!

But first, Matt had to make me a pattern. Have you ever imagined the skeletal structure of a mermaid? It looks, I assure you, exactly like this:

You only have to draw one half of your mermaid's spine, then trace and cut it on the fold:

After that, the snuggle sack is the easiest of builds--WAY easier than that dang shark! I copied Syd's original mermaid tail pattern onto black fleece, added a couple of feet to the top to accommodate that growth spurt, then appliqued the skeleton onto the front piece before sewing it together:

So. Much. APPLIQUE!

The inside lining of the skeleton tail is stash red fleece, because that's the inside color of mermaids, of course!

I LOVE how Syd's skeleton mermaid tail snuggle sack turned out:

It's cozy and warm and makes you feel like a mermaid without being, you know, twee or cringe or whatever word the kids are using these days.