My Kid's Baking Class, or, a Growth Mindset isn't for the Weak

fresh homemade croissant filled with prosciutto and cheese

Want to know yet another of my fun neuroses?

I don't like to see people praised for qualities like talent, intelligence, or beauty. Like, I'm not a psychopath--I tell my children and my husband that they're talented at whatever and they're smart and they're attractive, etc., but those are meant to be just, you know, the kind of compliments that make sure people know they're loved and awesome and appreciated.

But it's not, like, good or bad to be those things. People are also born the way that they're born, and they can't help how they're born. In my mind, if someone shows you, say, a test that they earned a good grade on and you say something like, "Oh, you're so smart!", you're really just pointing out that they didn't work hard for that grade because all they have is a natural knack for the material. 

This is 100% related to my childhood fucked-upness because hey, guess who got praised all the time for being smart and then about lost her damn mind when shit got difficult in college? I'll give you a hint: it's the same person who also got told all the time that she was fat and was not pretty, so I have first-hand knowledge that being called out on stuff you can't help is not the road to excellent mental health.

So for my kids' whole lives, whenever I've seen a knack emerge or a talent unfold, it's really important to me that when I encourage them, I'm encouraging them for what they've done to improve, not the simple fact of a condition they were born with. And whenever someone praises them for being smart or a good artist or looking pretty or whatever, I am 100% that nag who reminds them that it's what they do with their DNA-given amenities that's important. I have literally looked my children in the eyes and told them, straight-faced and unironically, "With great power comes great responsibility. You must use your powers for good." THAT'S how bad it is around here. 

I was kind of relieved, honestly, the other day when I started to say something about a recent compliment and my kid interrupted me to irritatedly note that, "Yes, Mom, I know it's nothing to my credit and the important thing is how hard I've worked to achieve this result! UGH!" She wouldn't be quoting me with such annoyance if she hadn't internalized the message, right?

I mean... right? Ahem.

ANYWAY, all this to say that my kid has been using her powers for SO MUCH PERSONAL GOOD lately! The kid has always had a knack for cooking, particularly baking. She likes the precision required to achieve perfect results, and she likes the artistry also required. Just between us, I also think it lends itself well to her own personal brand of pickiness, in which she wants to eat only the thing that she wants to eat and it must also be delicious and also look exactly right. 

When a kid seems to have a talent or interest in something, enrichment and challenge are the two ways to turn it into something that IS to their credit, so I've always tried to do that with this kid and cooking. She's had a lot of great experiences, but I, personally, don't have anything to teach her in that regard, being, alas, a miserable cook with zero interest in improvement, and she's never really liked children's cooking camps or classes, because she's never really found the work to be at a high enough level with the "proper" emphasis on perfection.

Junior year of high school has so far always felt like a good time for my homeschooling kids to start taking a real college class or two, and this kid actually started the summer before, when the local community college unexpectedly offered their entire summer course catalog free to current high school students. She'd wanted to take both Intro to Baking and its pre- or co-requisite, a ServSafe Manager Certification course, but alas, the baking class was cancelled so instead she chose to learn about serial killers while also becoming ServSafe certified.

And then in the fall I forced her to take a college art class, also in service of challenging and enriching one's innate gifts. 

So not until this spring semester was my kid finally able to put her ServSafe certification to use by FINALLY enrolling in this much longed for, much anticipated Intro to Baking class.

If I had known what would come home from those school kitchens, I would have moved heaven and earth to make this class happen sooner. Because OMG. It's like living in an expensive French bakery over here.

Check out these loaves!

The sandwich bread and dinner rolls!

The doughnuts, some filled!

And I'm not even going to lie--I teared up when I bit into this croissant, filled with homemade chocolate hazelnut spread, fresh from the oven and still warm:

Each baked item this kid has brought home has been the most delicious baked item I have ever eaten. Her cinnamon rolls were better than Cinnabon's. Her sandwich bread was better than Dave's Good Seed's. Slap my face, but her dinner rolls were better than Aunt Fannie Sue's. 

And she's got all this knowledge, now, of how stuff is supposed to be. She's reading her textbook and listening to the lectures and telling me about the baker's percent of salt in a recipe and hydrating your dough and why you should punch it down, all this stuff that I've never known and never even fathomed was something that could be known. 

I made a batch of apple muffins over the weekend, mostly because apparently only my college kid was doing her duty with the apples so we suddenly had several extremely puny-looking ones in the fruit bowl that nobody in their right mind was going to eat out of hand, but also because I thought that people might like muffins. And people ate them okay, but they for sure weren't delicious. I think I didn't use enough oil, and they were definitely too dry so I probably overbaked them, too? So I mentioned the uneaten muffins last night, as a reminder that they still existed and we needed to force-feed them to ourselves the next morning, and my kid was all, "Oh, right! We're actually making muffins in my class tomorrow!"

My immediate thought was, "Oh, shit! I will never be able to make a muffin again! Everyone will know that my batter wasn't hydrated and my baker's percentage of baking soda was off and I don't know how to cook!"

But you know what? That's the young me talking, the little kid who thought that smart is something that you were, not something that you did. What I'm ACTUALLY going to do when my kid brings home her beautiful batch of muffins in a few hours, the ones that will look and taste a thousand times better than my dry, hard apple muffins, is praise them for how beautiful they are and how delicious they taste, ask my kid a billion questions about how she did such and such to get such and such, compliment her for the work she put into improving her skills and achieving such a perfect result...

... and then ask her to teach me to make delicious and beautiful muffins, too. Tbh I'd kind of rather continue to bake sub-par muffins than take the time and effort to learn the skill properly, but we must let the kids see us practicing a growth mindset if we want them to do it, too, sigh and ugh.

How-To: Kid-Made Puzzle Piece Valentine

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2013.

Missing some pieces of your jigsaw puzzle, but still have a few mitchy-matchy ones? 

Your kiddos can create one handmade Valentine from just two perfectly fitting jigsaw pieces. Give them most of a box, and they can make all the Valentines for their class party. 

It's a fun upcycling project that won't cost you a cent. Yay for an eco-friendly Valentine's Day!

Here's how:

Big or small, edge or middle, this project relies on two linking puzzle pieces. Have your kiddos sort the remaining pieces from an incomplete jigsaw puzzle into linking pairs (save other orphaned puzzle pieces for more crafty upcycling projects!), then let them paint each pair a fun background color. My kiddos chose every color from red to green to black, and made themselves a glorious happy mess while they did so.

Set the pairs aside to dry, taking apart the pieces first so that they won't adhere to each other.

When the puzzle pieces are dry, fit them together again and show the kiddos how to paint a single heart onto the middle of the pairs, so that approximately half the heart rests on each piece. The kiddos can continue to decorate the pieces as they wish, with glitter and stickers and the other gaudy accouterments of kid-made greeting cards.

Once again, separate the pieces and let them dry. When everything is dry and set, the heart puzzle will be able to be taken apart and put together again. The kiddos can use the back side of their Valentines to write their name and some sort of horrible, punny Valentine greeting.

May I suggest "I love you to pieces?" Okay, I'm going to go vomit now.

Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Cookie Sale Signage and Campaigns

Local Girl Scout cookie prices rose from $5 a box to $6 a box this year. I'm not sad about the price increase, because it means that troops are receiving an additional 27 cents profit from each box, up from 75 cents per box in the last few years to $1.02 per box this year. That's going to lead to at least an extra $490 for my troop after every kid meets their selling goal, all with the same output of time and labor!

What I AM sad about is going through all the kid-created Girl Scout cookie sale signage that the troop has made over the past few years, tossing everything that reads $5. 

That 4 BOXES FOR $20 sign that one kid dreamed up and we're pretty sure has resulted in countless upsells? Gone, sigh! I guess we could replace it with 5 BOXES FOR $30, but it doesn't really have the same ring to it. The same with SOLD BY THE CASE FOR $60. Maybe I'll just cut the price part off...

When my troop led our Service Unit's Cookie Rally for years, we always set up a station to teach attendees how to craft a marketing message and walked them through creating a good cookie sale sign to use at cookie booths. Marketing is such an accessible way for even the youngest Daisies to participate, because, come on, even kindergartners know all about ads and commercials.

And if a kid continues in Girl Scouts, cookie sales are a great way for them to practice long-term problem-solving. Every year kids can evaluate the previous year's sale and replace or revise what didn't work, improve on what they created when they were younger now that they're older and have more sophisticated understanding and skills, and, yes, scrap a well-loved material and reimagine it when prices go up. 

Here we've got individual Girl Scout thank-you notes to include with Girl Delivery cookies; door hangers with links to a kid's Digital Cookie site, small "business cards" that the kids hand out at cookie booths with every purchase, and nicer thank-you cards that the troop gives to businesses that host our cookie booths--accompanying a box of Girl Scout cookies, of course!

COOKIE BOOTH MARKETING

DO: 

• high-quality, kid-designed, kid-made table cover
• removable, laminated payment and price signs
• temporary displays and hand-outs for special reasons

DON'T:

• big tabletop displays
• gimmicks with big kids
• prizes or thank-you gifts or fancy shopping bags--anything that you spend troop money on

My busy high school Girl Scouts don't have to call a yearly meeting just to create their cookie booth displays, because when they were young we took the time to make eye-catching, child-led displays that were made with quality materials and have lasted for years. 

In the early years, we did a LOT of trial-and error, and most of what we tried didn't stick for more than a year or two. Here's a booth from 2015:

The kids cobbled together the table cover during an afternoon meeting--it wasn't beautiful, but it was entirely kid-designed and kid-made and their best effort at the time! I firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with displays that look VERY kid-made--in fact, kids ought to be designing and building the booth displays almost completely by themselves, and the more that it looks like they have, as unpolished and age-appropriate as it is, the better customers like it. I know we troop leaders always say that "the cookies sell themselves," but that's because most customers aren't buying cookies just to buy cookies--they're buying cookies to support the kids! The more that customers can tell that kids are leading the project, the more customers will support them.

The kids spent a few years crafting highly-detailed and embellished tabletop displays featuring a cookie menu and information about our donation recipients, and I do think that those were good in their younger years, when the kids often needed that visual prompt to remember the cookie names and descriptions, etc. But it was always just one more thing to load and unload and carry and set up and take down, and if the booth was windy it would be unstable, and kids couldn't see over it if they were behind the table, and definitely couldn't conduct a transaction over it, so I am NOT sad that they eventually stopped wanting to create those massive displays. They occasionally do make and display posters with targeted marketing messages, but they just do that on posterboard now, sometimes reinforced with corrugated cardboard, and it works fine!

The kids also had a lot of fun thinking up and making that sandwich board and wearing it the first year or two we sold cookies. It was good to have one more job for a kid during those early years when they couldn't always conduct transactions independently or were sometimes too shy to talk to customers. I stored it behind a dresser in between cookie seasons, and I thought it was adorable WAY longer than the kids did. Honestly, I think a kid might have trashed it behind my back, because I feel like it just disappeared one day!

The best displays that the kids made are the two felt table covers that they all worked together to make, just one year after that first cobbled-together one. A canvas drop cloth would also work for this, but I used felt for each table cover, long enough to fit our six-foot folding table, and wide enough to cover the top of the table and all the way to the ground in front--that's to hide all the crap we store under the table, mwa-ha-ha!

I had loads of stash felt at the time, so I plugged in all my hot glue guns, brought out all that felt and all the scissors, and basically just let the kids have at it. What they created is, I think, the cutest table cover that I have ever seen. It's clearly kid-designed and kid-made, but also it's clear, visually distinctive, and, I think, very well designed. You can definitely tell that the kids made it when they were practically babies, but it's sweet and lovely enough that they've never, great big teenagers that they are, requested that we make something to replace it with. 

Of course, they could just be remembering how much effort they put into the first one and how much work it would be to make a new one, but that's one of the reasons why we do our work well the first time!

Over the years, the kids have tried various other cookie booth marketing campaigns, from offering "prizes" to people who bought a certain number of boxes (this was the year that Rainbow Loom bracelets were on trend, so guess what the prizes were...), to handing out free samples, to including free cookie-themed valentines in our pre-Valentine's Day booths, to putting everyone's purchases into lovely brown paper gift bags. All those tactics did keep squirrely little kids busy, and encouraged young Girl Scouts to have positive customer interactions when some of them were very shy, but I wouldn't say that they ever increased sales. If a troop parent wanted to organize a cute cookie booth gimmick that the kids seemed into, then we'd go with it, but it wasn't worth spending troop money on.

DOOR-TO-DOOR SIGNAGE

DO:

• door hanger with QR code/link to Digital Cookie

DON'T:

• anything that has a cell number, email address, or contact info other than that Digital Cookie link

Door-to-door Girl Scout cookie sales have come a long way since the olden days of walking around and ringing doorbells and writing pre-orders on a clipboard! Here are the old-school door hangers and order clipboards that my kids used way back in the day:

I'd even keep their spelling mistakes. Kid-made, amiright?

The kids still use these clipboards for out-and-about activities that require a portable writing surface.

Now, thanks to Digital Cookie and its Girl-Delivered feature, the kids only have to walk around neighborhoods and leave door hangers. People can pick them up at their leisure, click on a kid's Digital Cookie site at their leisure, order cookies, and the Girl Scout can just swing by and pop their order on their porch. It's a whole new wonderful world that we live in!

With all the technology, the kids' door hangers do look more polished and less kid-designed. It's age-appropriate for my teenagers, but if I still had a troop of little ones, I'd still be encouraging them to hand-draw their own marketing images and slogans to add to the door hanger graphics.

INDIVIDUAL GIRL SCOUT SIGNAGE

DO:

• digital graphic for social media marketing
• Girl Scout photo for Digital Cookie
• yard sign
• flyers to pass out in person
• thank-you notes to special customers (and grandparents!)

DON'T:

• elaborate thank-you notes to everyone (good etiquette, but doesn't bring additional sales)
• off-season marketing (unless it's to earn a badge, ahem)

There is so much room for personality here! Kids can make all kinds of signage for their personal cookie sales, depending on what they think will be useful. Several years ago, my younger kid made this webcomic for me to use when promoting her brand-new Digital Cookie site on my social media, and it's still my favorite thing:

She also experimented with making a cute Girl Scout avatar for her Digital Cookie site--

--but ultimate decided (correctly, I think), that it was more effective to use a real photo of her doing something Girl Scouty and awesome.

Digital Cookie has also made it a LOT easier to promote Girl Scout cookies to the neighborhood. Matt took my kid's basic door hanger design, rearranged and tiled it, and printed it. I laminated the pages--

--assembled them--

--and just like that, we've got a yard sign!

The kids have always written thank-you notes to family members and family friends who've bought cookies from them, but instead of something similar for Girl Delivery customers, they use just a simple printed handout that thanks the customer for supporting Girl Scouts, and gives the QR code for their Digital Cookie site so they can order more. Again, if I had younger kids, I'd have them handwrite or draw a thank-graphic to put onto that flyer, but a completely digitally designed product is teenager-appropriate. Everyone knows that teens know how to use Photoshop!

Speaking of Photoshop... one year, Matt helped my older kid create this cookie-themed Christmas postcards as part of earning the Girl Scout Senior Customer Loyalty badge:

I thought those badge activities were really hit-or-miss--some of the activities were marvelous and tangibly amped up her communication and business skills, and some were completely worthless. This one was... well, it only cost us a few postcard stamps, ahem.

TROOP SIGNAGE

Girl Scouts can collaborate on troop-level signage that they can use at cookie booths or during their own marketing and publicity. I handle this with my troop by seeing if there's a kid who needs to make something to earn a cookie business badge that we're not earning as a troop, or who just wants to volunteer to make something. The display in the above photo was a marketing tool for the troop's push to collect a donated box of Girl Scout cookies for every single participant in our community's weekend meals program for children experiencing food insecurity. A kid wrote up a marketing message, I added a photo I took of the troop volunteering with this program, and Matt made it into a poster that also had a counter to our goal. I don't think the poster alone would have necessarily increased donations, but it was a great reminder to the kids that they really needed to promote their campaign to customers, and seeing how many boxes they still needed to solicit was good incentive to actually do it!

Donation cans are kind of my collective cookie booth nemesis. They get SO banged up every year, and I get SO tired of sourcing good cans and getting kids to volunteer to decorate them every single year. Eventually, I had the brilliant idea of asking a kid if they could design just one model can wrap for each of our causes, and now I just have to print a new can wrap whenever the old can gets destroyed:

That reminds me that I should ask a kid to design a troop donation can wrap this week, because all of our troop donation cans are TRASHED!!!

Kids can also use the cookie booth space to bring awareness to any individual or troop Girl Scout project that is utilizing cookie profits for its funding. One year, my kid made these brochures to bring awareness to her Silver Award Take Action Project:

Again, I don't know if the brochures alone increased cookie sales, but they were a good way to encourage the kids to initiate better conversations with customers, which in turn reminded customers of tangible ways that their purchase supports kids, and in turn I do think that it got more donations put in our troop donation can.

I'm just now realizing, as I write this, that the troop's most successful marketing tools have been the ones that encouraged the kids' engagement, and didn't necessarily focus on sales or even the customers themselves. Displays that the kids clearly put a ton of interest and effort into attract customers, displays that show how kids have used cookie profits to engage in enriching activities inspire customers, kid-made displays charm customers, and kid-created marketing campaigns are used by the kids to help them talk to and otherwise interact with customers.

Okay, off to see which troop kids have time to design a new troop donation can wrap!

P.S. Want to read more about Girl Scout cookie booth math and marketing? Here's my complete series (so far!):

• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!
• My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales
• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Math: Equal It Out and Assign It Fairly
• Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Signage and Campaigns

P.P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

There's a New Fence in the Yard

 

Ugh, I wish we'd done this a decade ago.

The other night I was texting back and forth with my college kid, telling her about Luna's day in my care (we had a nice walk, then some breakfast, then I turned my electric blanket on high so she could lay on it all day, then Matt and I took her for a hike and she saw some deer, then I let her try out the new lick mat that I bought her, then she curled up on the couch so I tucked her in with her favorite fleece blanket, etc.), and she accused me of taking the opportunity of her absence to spoil her dog.

RUDE!

Also true. I mean, my kid's not here, so other than texting her all day and Zooming her once a week and playing Stardew Valley together once a week and watching a couple of episodes of Schitt's Creek online together once a week and sending her monthly care packages with curated treats and toiletries and little handmade gifts inside what am I SUPPOSED to do with all this obsessive parent energy?!?

Spoil the one other creature in the family who misses my kid as much as I do, of course!

It's telling, ahem, that I have thought for the entire decade+ that we've lived in this house that a front yard fence would be great for the kids--the whole family, really--and I didn't get around to insisting on it hard enough to make it happen until the kids were grown and the main ones who'll benefit from it are me and the dog.

Whatever. It's here now, and I LOVE it!

The fence guys for sure side-eyed my instructions for the fence, but the lead guy said, "I just do what I'm told and don't ask questions," followed in the same breath by "WHY do you want a privacy fence only on one side of the yard?"

Because this beautiful privacy fence side--

--faces the street! My across-the-street neighbor is delightful, generous, and kind in person, but he's got lots and lots of Trump flags facing our house, and he's got two absolutely GIANT lamps at the end of his driveway that he never, ever turns off and whose bulbs never, ever seem to burn out. They just burn, bright as the sun, all through the night directly into all of our bedroom windows.

As a bonus, this is where I hang all of our laundry to dry, seasonally, and now I don't have to worry that someone will drive by, become consumed with jealousy of my beautiful handmade quilts and clothes, and sneak into the yard to steal them:

The other two sides of the fence are your basic chain link--

--because they face other parts of our property and I didn't want to cut that off visually.

THIS side even faces the south!

I *think* I'm going to move all of those raised garden beds to live next to this fence, although lord knows how I'm going to water them because I already own the longest hose that Menards even sells. 

I'm pretty excited about planning new garden elements to fit in with the new fence. This is my Late Winter of Optimism, my favorite gardening time of the year, before I have to come to terms with the fact that the parts of the property that I can garden on just don't get the amount of sunlight needed to make whatever I want to do possible. If anyone wants to throw out any great gardening and landscaping ideas for me, feel free! I've got an east-facing hill with morning full sun and afternoon full shade that I'd like perennial coverage on to the extent that I never have to risk my life mowing it again, and a south-facing yard that I'd be happy to have raised garden or bed plants in that gets morning full sun and afternoon dappled sun through the branches of black walnut and persimmon trees. 

Tell me daily that berry bushes will not live in either of these spots. I need to hear it every single day or I'll plant them and be sad.

Stardew Valley is My Emotional Support Cozy Game

For Father's Day last year, the kids and I gave Matt the newest Playstation, and it has been the BEST TOY EVER! The local public library has an excellent selection of Playstation 5 games, and it took me about a week to build up a nice, long list of cozy games for my holds queue. 

The greatest of these games is Stardew Valley.

I happened to check it out from the library right before Matt and one teenager left for Peru, so there was nothing to stop the other teenager and I from becoming absolutely obsessed with it. After our first game, when I said, "Hey, want to try out this new game with me?" and then I swear the next time I blinked it was four hours later, I literally started to set a phone alarm when we sat down to play together.

When my other teenager had returned from her trip and was out of COVID quarantine and ready to hang out at the same video game console, we started our own co-op game together and she also became obsessed. And then all three of us each started our own individual farms, too...

Like, the only person in the family who doesn't live and breathe and dream Stardew Valley, weirdly, is MATT! The guy who plays every other video game so obsessively that we keep threatening to buy him a Witcher body pillow for his next Father's Day! I tried to start a farm with him one night, but he was... bored, of all things! I don't think there's enough murder and adrenaline in the game for him.

But, of course, the lack of murder and adrenaline is EXACTLY what I love about Stardew Valley!

So, the game. You start out having inherited a small farm adjacent to a small village. From there, you can do what you want. You can putter away on your farm, decide what to grow and plant and water it, harvest it and sell it, make improvements and unlock new things to build and putter around with. 

You can raise animals, and treat them nicely and improve their habitats and sell eggs, milk, and wool, or cook or craft with the products. You can fish, and try to catch different types of fish, and learn how to build crab pots, and build a machine that recycles the trash you fish out of the waters:

You can mine, and collect minerals and gems and ore that you can smelt and build with, kill monsters, explore the levels. 

You can play by yourself, but you can also start a co-op farm that you can share with as many people as you feel like can fit on the screen with you. Then you can both go off and do your own thing or work together. Here, I'm fishing at dusk while my teenager is exploring the mines. We'll share all our loot!

You can interact with the villagers, give them presents and go on quests with them, build friendships and unlock other secret missions. There's a Community Center that you can rebuild by gathering different items and unlocking new areas on the map:

The three of us LOVE trying to collect all the items to work towards rebuilding the Community Center. We are going to be genuinely sad when that challenge is completed!

 Days pass and seasons change, and the seasons bring new plants to grow and forage. You can earn money to improve your tiny little cabin--

--and you can buy and sometimes are given things to decorate it with. None of us have improved our tiny little cabins yet, but one teenager spends a LOT of time and money collecting floors and wallpapers, so it's only a matter of time.

There's a museum where you can donate your weird finds--

It was a mistake to donate that dinosaur egg. Apparently they're REALLY hard to find, and you can incubate an actual dinosaur from one!

--and earn rewards, or you can keep them and display them yourself, or sometimes you'll find that they're called for in future quests or builds.

All the villagers have drama, and when you start to get to know them, they'll involve you in their interpersonal messes. 

One of the teenagers is trying to get Abigail to fall in love with her. It's working!

All of that is available to do, but you don't *have* to do any of it! You can putter around and do exactly what you want. Want to farm and ignore the villagers? Totally fine! Want to put all your efforts into rebuilding the Community Center and ignore your farm? You can do it! You can't die, and you can't lose. You just putter happily away at the work you want to do, feeling like you're busy and making progress, but nothing is so urgent that you have to stress about it.

I know absolutely zero about how video games are created, so the other day I read Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, each chapter of which is about the creation of a different video game. It turns out that most games are build by huge teams, which are then broken down into smaller teams, who then have to figure out how to communicate with each other and work across their various specialties and just when they get something right, someone from the top comes along and changes the direction of the game or wants an entirely different character or just otherwise completely messes everything up.

Stardew Valley, however, was created and programmed and built from scratch almost entirely by one guy, ConcernedApe. For five years, his partner supported ConcernedApe financially while he by turns puttered casually or obsessed deeply, assembling Stardew Valley by bits and pieces according to whatever he felt like working on at any given time. Instead of relying on a team and its specialties, he taught himself all the specialties, all the programs, all the skills required to create a complete video game. This includes scrapping all his work on a section when he improved enough to do a better job. It's... psychotic, honestly. Misanthropic, even. But it IS a masterpiece.

Also? His partner is a hero and a saint. I do not think that I am constitutionally capable of supporting someone for 5+ years while they pursue their dream of single-handedly creating an entire video game from scratch. I mean, that's... that's bonkers! His partner was working and attending college, then working full-time, then working and attending grad school, and the entire time, this guy's in their bedroom fiddling around on the computer. Like, there is definitely a prize for being the Most Supportive Partner, and she won it. 

The kids and I played all summer and fall on the Playstation, and we enjoyed it so much that before we sent Will off to college, Matt bought the PC versions of Stardew Valley for each of us. So now a couple of times a week I phone her, put her on speaker, and then we log into Moonspot Farm for an hour of cooperative puttering while we chat. During that hour, I genuinely forget how far away she is, and how much I miss her.

It's my favorite thing.

WIP Wednesday: Felt and Fences

It's the middle of the week, and here are the projects that I'm in the middle of!

Felt Moveable Alphabet

I saw this TikTok the other day--

--and immediately decided that a felt moveable alphabet would be the perfect next big gift for my toddler niece, AND it would also work to accomplish one of my favorite long-term goals, which is to use up my ridiculously large felt stash!

Here's where I am on that project today:

Cutting and sewing by hand is VERY slow going for me, so it's good that I'm not in a hurry to finish this project. The letters are looking super cute, though, exactly the way I'd hoped, and I love how tactile and sensorial they're going to be with the color and the heft and the stitching and the texture. I'm also considering making some command cards with short words on them in the same font, sized so that my niece can set these felt letters directly on them to spell the words. 

Front Yard Fence

I've been able to read the writing on the wall for years now, with my college-bound kid and the dog she takes on two walks a day.

Gee, I wonder who's going to pick up that slack when she goes off to college?

I've been bitching my head off for years about our need for a fenced-in yard, and I'm not even going to go into how I would have freaking LOVED to have had it when the kids were young enough that I didn't like them playing out there, just one roll down the hill from a road with a high speed limit. 

But oh, well. I will also love it when I can substitute one walk a day for letting Luna out to frolic in what will soon be our fenced front yard!

And crap. Here's me just now noticing, after the fence guys have been out there all morning so I know that part of the fence is mostly done by now, that the gate isn't lined up with the sidewalk?!?

Whatever. I'll just sit planters on that sidewalk, I guess.

Eco-Friendly Kid Craft Book Reviews

I wrote 50% of this article last week, and another 40% of it on Monday, and now I'm just waiting for the public library to give me the last book I need. Hopefully I'm able to pick it up in the next couple of days, or I'll have to come up with a completely different topic and write an entirely new article for Crafting a Green World this week!

Novel and Non-Fiction

Here are the books that I'm currently in the middle of:

Please note that neither of these are the many books in my house that are overdue--those I'm probably going to have to just return and check out again, ahem. 

Deliberately Divided is a study of what little can be known so far about the unethical human experimentation done in New York City by deliberating separating twins and triplets surrendered for adoption, never telling them or their families what had been done, and regularly testing and observing the children for several years afterwards, to what purpose we don't know, because the experimenters never published their results and instead insisted that all records of their actions be sealed until 2065. To me, the idea of separating newborn siblings for no other reason than to study them feels like an unconscionable human rights violation, and I think I'm progressing so slowly through this book partly because it makes me feel so sad.

The Book of Accidents seems, so far, to be a horror novel about a haunted house and maybe a ghostly serial killer? I'm not sold on it yet, but I do usually love horror, so I'll give it a few more chapters before I decide to DNR it.

Teenager's Bedroom

The house I grew up in had paneling on all the walls, and I still really don't know a ton about painting rooms. But I DO know that I hate priming these bookshelves the most!

I'm pretending like someone is going to help me prime the whole top half of the shelves that are too tall for me, and the top half of the walls, too, but in reality I'm going to have to go get the ladder from the garage, unfortunately.

But check out how much whiter the primer is than those nasty walls that I did kind of already know were nasty, but did think were white?!?

And nope, I don't have drop cloths down, because we've booked a company to come and tear up that nasty carpet, fix the floors so that they're actually level, and then install wood flooring. I'm trying to figure out if I should definitely paint the baseboards and door frames now, or see if I can paint them when the workers take them off to do the floors, or do it after they've finished and just hope I'm more careful in here than I was when I painted the walls in the family room, ahem.

Here's to my fond hope that by this time next week, all of these WIPs will be finished and I'll be in the middle of all-new WIPs!

Other than that alphabet, of course. That alphabet is going to take me months to finish...

Celebrate the 100th Day of the Year with Me

Every year, the teenagers and I volunteer with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis' 100 Days of School celebration. Area schools bring their kindergartners and first graders to the museum, and in between visiting the exhibits, the volunteers help the kids do fun activities relating to the number 100.

This year, my teenager and I had hoped to be assigned to the 100-bean maraca station again, but I actually loved the station we ended up at even more!

When kids came to our station, we helped them measure their height and their arm span, and helped them record the information in inches and centimeters:

If the kids had a little extra time because they were waiting on a few kids to finish up, I'd sometimes also have them stand on their tiptoes and then measure their height so we could compare how much taller they were on tiptoes (usually something like three inches!), or we'd see how long they could step or how high they could reach, etc. There's a lot you can do with a horizontal ruler and a vertical ruler!

It's always fun to me to see the range of kids we encounter, and the differences and similarities--we run through something like 250 kids in two hours, so those differences and similarities are really noticeable! Most of the kids, for instance, were around 143-147 centimeters tall, and their arm spans were always a little shorter. BUT they were all wearing shoes, so I told them that if they hadn't been, their arm span would be the same as their height! It was especially fun for kids to measure themselves against the horizontal ruler and then step back to visualize their arm span, so now I'm on a whole kick about how early ed classrooms ought to have those rulers set out the same way that most of them probably have height charts, so kids can visualize lengths in two planes. 

Many of the kids could not write numbers bigger than 100, but many could, and nearly all could write the numbers below 100. Several kids did a cute thing in which if I said, for instance, that they were 145 centimeters tall, they would write "100 45" on the line. I'd then show them what it looked like to combine it into 145, but I thought their solution was so clever, especially coming from different kids from different schools!

The 100th Day of School wasn't a thing when Matt or I were in school, so it wasn't on my radar when the kids were little enough to have fun with it, and I'm actually really sad about that, because we LOVED random little holidays and celebrations like that, and it would have been as super cute as our yearly celebration of Pi Day and everyone's half birthdays and May the Fourth. The celebration is a fun excuse for kids not just to practice the one-to-one correspondence of counting and the fine-motor skills of writing the numbers, but also to build context and meaning for the concept of 100, and explore the way that larger numbers work.

This year, the 100th day of the year is Monday, April 10, which is quite a respectable homeschool day to celebrate a holiday! Here are some activities that I think would be fun--and educational!--to do with younger kids to celebrate the 100th day of the year:

paper chain. We made SO MANY paper chains when the kids were younger! The younger kid, especially was all in on paper chains, and we used them a lot to count down to various big events. Here's the paper chain birthday countdown that we made in anticipation of her fourth birthday, including the discovery that tearing a link off of a paper chain? OMG, such horror. Such despair.

That's why I actually think a paper chain counting UP to the 100th day of the year would be so great. Every day you don't tear a link off--you ADD one!!! Much less distressing to those tender, tiny hearts. 

For bonus points, make these laminated index cards with the numbers and number words on them for kids to match, trace, and add to their collection each day.

hundred grid fraction art. This reminds me a little of the mathematical map coloring that the kids loved just a few years ago! Kids color a pixel design onto a hundred grid, then can play with rearranging the colors and recording the fractional or decimal representation of each color.

roll to a hundred (or roll to zero). This is a fast-paced game that both of my kids loved long after they'd mastered their numbers, addition, and subtraction to 100. And it incorporates coloring, which is ALSO super fun (and utilizes those fine-motor skills, ahem):

This would make a fun "party game" for the hundredth day of the year, and you could even possibly convince a kid to fill out a blank 100 grid in preparation.

build with 100 things. This works well if you've got sets of more than 100 of various building toys, like LEGOs or blocks, but it would also probably be even more fun and creative if you chose seemingly random things. Can you build something or create a design using 100 pennies? Can you build a structure using 100 books? Who can build the biggest pyramid out of 100 rocks? Tiny little things in bulk also make fabulous math manipulatives, so it wouldn't be a terrible idea to splash out and buy your kid a 100-set of something small and cute as a 100th Day of the Year gift.

write a googol. That time that we read a book about googols, and then I asked each of my small children to write one, turned into a bit of a wacky adventure.

I scrolled Pinterest to look at other ideas, and while a lot of projects made me cringe or looked super corny, there was also tons of non-cringe, non-corny ideas to build a kid's numeracy and inspire them to love larger numbers and help them feel festive and celebratory. Many of the printables displayed would also work well for us homeschoolers to celebrate the 100th day of the year. I know that *I*, for one, will be coloring and wearing a giant cardboard 100-shaped hat on April 10!

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!