Zebrafied

October 1

 ME: What do you want to dress as for Halloween? 

WILL: A round cracker. 

October 3

 ME: Let's go to the Recycling Center and get some cardboard for your cracker costume. 

WILL: I changed my mind--now I want to be a kitten stuck up a tree. 

October 7

 ME: Do you still want to dress as a kitten stuck up a tree? 

WILL: Yes. 

October 10

 ME: Do you still want to be a kitten stuck up a tree? 

WILL: Yes! 

October 15

 ME: What do you want to be for Halloween again? 

WILL: A kitten stuck up a tree. 

October 20

 ME: Should we make your tree branches out of real sticks or PVC pipe? 

WILL: I don't want to be a kitten anymore; I want to be a duck-billed dinosaur. 

October 25

 ME: Come try on this romper--it's going to be your duckbilled dinosaur body. 

WILL: I changed my mind--I really, really, really, really want to be a rainbow pony! 

October 27

 ME: Come look in your horses encyclopedia and show me kind of what your rainbow pony should be shaped like. 

WILL (flipping through book): No, I want to be a zebra! A zebra! Zebraaaaaaa! 

My only solution? Sit right down in the midst of the mess and chaos of our Monday morning and spend five hours making this zebra costume before the kid can change her mind and want to be something else!The best part for me? This is all stash! I used a well-fitting fleece romper of Will's as a template to create a new romper pattern with this black-and-white stretch jersey that a friend gave me a while ago. The zipper is from some I bought at a garage sale for about a nickel a piece this summer. 

I've actually never put together a piece of clothing like this before, so the structuring required lots of deep thinking and there are a few wonky parts, but who cares about those, right? The tail has some black fleece from my scrap bin--I really wanted to sew on a button, like on Eeyore's tail, but alas! my button stash is very thin these days. Some days I wish a big jar of buttons would just fall into my lap--that's a very boring wish, isn't it?

The zebra's mane is cut from a boa that lives in the kids' dress-up bin; unfortunately, it doesn't sit very straight when the hood is being worn, but whatever.

 

And for the ears, I used some pink acrylic felt (made out of recycled plastic bottles!) from the approximately one thousand yards I bought when it was on major sale at Joann's a few weeks ago. I think I'm going to use it again in another little birthday present this week...

Fortunately, Syd, being two, knows her own mind better than Will knows hers--Syd has wanted to be a lion from day one, and is perfectly happy with the lion costume that lives in the dress-up bin. 

Next year, though, I know: I'll keep asking about Halloween costumes until a kid mentions one I think I know how to make, and then I'll make it right that very freakin' minute! 

Sunday is our Day of Slog

We did basically zero fun stuff today. I folded and put away about a gazillion pounds of this----while finishing up Joan of Arcadia Season 2 on DVD (Adam Rove, to think how much I loved you, and you are awful! An awful person!); I washed another gazillion pounds of this----while making beer bread savory muffins with dill and two cheeses with the baby----(along with the dinner I cooked out of cabbage, potato, onion and nutritional yeast, it was delicious--when I do have to cook, I tend to just throw cheese or veganaise or nutritional yeast at my food until it tastes good); and Matt, much more slowly than I think he needed to, built----the most awesomest bookshelves in the known universe:

Cause it's not how much stuff you have that's important, it's just having a place to put it.

Will, as seems inevitable based on how she's standing right at her father's feet and staring straight up at him while he drills heavy metal stuff to the wall, eventually got her face busted on a metal railing; it's been so long since a kid has busted her face at home that I think they both forgot that Momma gives out popsicles for face-busting (juice frozen into a mold--ices the wound, provides counter-pressure, and they think they're getting a treat so they stop screaming). Sydney walked around for the rest of the afternoon saying, "I got ouchie, too. I need 'sicle." I'm all, "Show me the blood, kid. Show me the blood."

Adventures of the Green Goth

I went and did it! I made a Papel Picado banner consisting solely of skulls, using the templates from my newest secret girlfriend, The Toymaker. I upcycled pages for this banner from an old and really boring encyclopedia--I first tried out using glossy magazine pages, but they were pretty slippery and I dislike fiddly activities.

And then? And then I hung my brand-new skulls banner in the master bedroom, right above our bed. Totally not weird, right?

Speaking of fiddly activities...I also spent two hours at Parents' Workday at Will's school today writing up a very detailed Collection Development Policy for the Parents' Library. Don't even get started on the fact that the Parents' Library has about 15 books in it, total. I have dreams, people.

P.S. Check out my post about The Toymaker's Papel Picado (I know, that makes three posts about this! But she's my secret girlfriend!) over at Crafting a Green World.

Crafty Little Kids' Books

While my little book girls busily defoliate the library shelves----I have this habit of looking for crafty children's books. Here's what I found this morning:

• 
  Masquerading as a warm little tale of a pioneer family, this book is actually totally creepy. The mom and the kids sew and make bean stew all day, and while the mom sews on her schoolhouse block quilt, the kids reminisce about the fire that nearly killed them all two years ago, and while one kid sews on her bear paw quilt, they all reminisce about the time Paw nearly got et by a bear. Fun.
• 
  I love this book. Swain presents four different pieces of art, and asks these imaginative little questions and draws these engaging full-page pictures about each one.
• 
  While my girlies aren't old enough for the concept behind this book, as a quilter I'm fascinated by how American slaves used symbology in their patchwork quilts. This story follows the path of a little girl who uses her mother's quilt as a map as she and her father escape to freedom in Canada. Nothing scary actually happens on the pages, so you'd also be able to ad-lib the words and just talk about the quilt blocks and the people who used them if you chose.
• 
  Another bittersweet story about a slave, this is a fictional account of the childhood of Marietta Tintoretto in Renaissance Venice. The illustrations are lifelike and beautiful, and it's an accurate slice of life picture of the Renaissance, although you'd have to also explain the concept of historical fiction here if you were homeschooling with this, say.
• 
  Okay, this is literature by no means, but it has sock monkeys! Real sock monkeys! And they're all dressed up and dancing and stuff!

I totally need to make some sock monkeys.

Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper Paper

After an excitement-filled morning watching Sydney repeatedly hang----and then drop to her doom----over and over and OVER again, in the afternoon we chilled down in the playroom.

The girls busied themselves industriously----if by industrious you mean that they tore up a bunch of my scrapbook paper and then drew on it and then taped it to the wall with the carpet tape that Matt was supposed to use to tape down the flooring four MONTHS ago and then fought over the same square inch of a six-foot-long roll of butcher paper.

The girls wanted me to hang with them, so instead of washing dishes or folding laundry or blogging for bucks I took some scrapbook paper and the Halloween Papel Picado paper bunting templates (a free download from The Toymaker )and created this: I didn't realize how much I would love these paper buntings until I started making them. I mean, seriously, look how awesome:

I like how the scrapbook paper doesn't necessarily match the overt theme, and since Will now wants another bunting just for her room, I think I'm going to try making a couple of more buntings from recycled materials--magazines, old book pages, newspaper, etc.

The downloadable templates for this bunting also include a cat and an owl, but I thought I might save those for a different activity. In upcoming years it would certainly be interesting to explore the Papel Picado with the girls as well as other aspects of the Day of the Dead, but for this year we're mostly exploring Halloween as a celebration of autumn. Why, then, you may ask, did I put skulls in our bunting?

Well, as Willow would explain to you, "Momma just likes skulls." What can I say--I'm an existentialist.

Tattoo My Babies Like I Still Live in Arkansas

It's not even two o'clock pm, yet, and the girls and I have done so many prosaic things already:

We frolicked outdoors in the autumn chill.

We had a lovely outdoor picnic lunch, during which Sydney, who just yesterday had to have her entire lunch removed from the table until she agreed to try her slice of dried peach (Mean Momma Rule #487: You must taste--as in put in your mouth, not necessarily swallow--every single item of food on your plate. If you refuse--goodbye, plate. See you next meal!), ate all the rest of the entire bag of dried peaches.

We played on the playground, and the Willow learned a new trick:

And we did it all while tattooed up like gangstas:

For a while, I've been wanting a set of these Satetytats. It's a cool idea--when you go somewhere crowded, stick a temporary tattoo on your kid that reads "If I'm lost, call _____". I almost bought some, and then I thought, "Temporary tattoos, huh? I wonder if one can make their own temporary tattoos..."

Turns out that you can. You can buy temporary tattoo paper that can be fed through your home printer. The tattoos don't look quite the same as commercial temporary tattoos, because whereas commercial tats actually use an ink that sort of dyes your skin, these tats embed your printer ink in a medical-grade adhesive that then sticks to your skin. Our tattoos have a shiny rather than a matte finish, for instance, they tend to wrinkle a little, and they're not as durable, being designed to come off with one wash. Awesome, however, they still are.

I meant to just print off a sheet of the "If I'm Lost" tattooes, but then I got all caught up in the possibilities. Transformers tattoos for Matt!

Tats made from scans of some of the girls' favorite picture books!From my digital collection of artwork that depicts breastfeeding!WordArt of the girls' names, and some of their own original artwork!Buffy the Vampire Slayer tats, and tats from my own original photography!Oh, and the tattoos with my cell number in case the girls get lost in a crowd:Gangsta, right?

Hit the Big-Time

I sort of get paid for writing, now.

My newest gig is over at Green Options, a blogging community devoted to sustainable living. The blogs located under Green Options are each themed, and the topics range from politics to the arts to business and technology. I write under the Crafting a Green World and the Eco Child's Play blogs, and you'll be able to find me over there in each blog three or four times a week, earning some extra chump change and spewing my ever-ready opinions out to an even bigger audience--you probably didn't think I had even more opinions than the ones I unburden myself of right here, did you? Well, I do.

My first post? A manifesto, of course. And then I go off about zoos.

And what have my kids been doing while I've been posting on THREE blogs, and grading papers, and meeting with students, and washing the entire contents of our house in the sanitary cycle of the washing machine in panicked reaction to Will's pinworm infestation? Why, playing crazy games with numbers, of course!

During the Great Study Cleaning, the girls got ahold of some vintage Bingo cards I'd been saving for...something, and, always the ones with the awesome ideas, Willow cut the cards up into their individual numbers and the kiddos thought that this was just pretty awesome.

When I saw them playing so happily together with such an obvious learning tool, I tried to elbow my way on into their game with a little lesson on how to line them up in order from smallest to largest, but that lesson sucked, and it's so much better when you're just faced with a line of obscurely ordered items and you get to figure out the complicated pattern behind them for yourself:

Go see my big-bucks blog! See if you can figure out what word the Eco Child's Play editor had to correct my spelling of! See then if you can figure out exactly how many post-graduate degrees (hint: more than one) I have and I still misspell that word!