--all day for two days. One little girl has a high fever. Two little girls have been constantly in demand of snacks and juice, almost as constantly spilling them all over MY nice big bed. One little girl finds herself unable to nap restfully or sleep comfortably at night. Two little girls have been bogarting MY computer to watch PBS kids' shows on Netflix's Watch Instant feature. One little girl is cranky and uncomfortable. Two little girls have been whining and fighting with each other. One little girl just wants to nurse all the time. One Momma is going nuts, showerless and nursed out and with a headache from all the noise and tired of cartoons and just a little nauseous from comforting herself by eating almost all the Halloween candy in the house.So for lack of anything productive to do while sitting in bed with two little girls and watching some Land Before Time movie for the twentieth time IN A ROW, I made even more fiddly little paper Halloween crafts--apparently my "Make Halloween decorations" assignment on my To Do List will not be marked off until November 1.
I made a cutie little 3-D Jack-o-Lantern ornament out of cardstock:
This guy is from the most awesomest site in the known universe if you happen to like fiddly little fold-and-cut-paper crafts: The Japanese Paper Museum.Yep, it's mostly in Japanese. Just click on stuff. Here's the Jack-o-Lantern; here's a cityscape with 3-D paper vehicles and people and road signs that you can cut out and fold and glue together; here are a whole bunch of paper dollhouse rooms and shops that you can make, including this Christmas scene; here are a bunch of animals, including (the awesomeness!) a model skeleton of a T. Rex; and here's sushi!
I had to have my graphic designer husband tell me how to cut and fold together the Jack-o-Lantern, but he claimed (of course) that the instructional illustrations were quite straightforward, and truly, I'm not terribly spacially inclined (although the last couple of years of crafting as a hobby have improved this part of my brain tremendously, I can tell). I saved nearly all these paper patterns to try later, so if you try a different one, tell me how it goes.
I also, in a desperately and almost entirely unsuccessful attempt to divert the girlies away from TV towards other quiet activities, made this garland from Paper Crave. The artist has a black-inked one, but I printed out the outline templates and wheedled Willow into coloring them in for me:
I just really like the style of these--not cutesie, but not gruesome. I also saved the sheet of mini-templates to perhaps use for stickers or magnets, and the digital scrapbook paper because I very occasionally do some scrapbooking.Ooh, Matt's home. Perhaps I can bribe him into luring the kids away from TV for a couple of books while I take a shower!
P.S. I have a tutorial up for these matching games that I make for the girls over at Eco Child's Play.
We spent a long time on this one--I'm all, "Ooh, an art project!" You choose an animal silhouette to stencil with your choice of colored pencil onto a little piece of paper, and you can color your animal. Then you look for the card that has your animal on it, and you copy the name of that animal, written in lower-case letters, onto your paper. When you have several animals done, you can put a piece of wallpaper sample on top, staple them all into a book, and stamp the date on the back.
I kept spreading all my stuff all over the table, and Will kept cleaning up after me, gently insisting, "It's important to keep a clear work area, Momma." Huh.
This is the counting penguins work. There are a lot of them, and the number changes slightly every day--Willow claims this is due to magic.
This is the handwriting work, done on a little desk that you can get from under a shelf and put on the carpet instead of a work mat. This work, the stencils work, and the chalk work are three that Willow brings home to us almost every day.
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. 
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.
--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: 
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.
--I have this habit of looking for crafty children's books. Here's what I found this morning:
--and then drop to her doom--
--over and over and OVER again, in the afternoon we chilled down in the playroom.
--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.
