Party Hero, Party Foul

So I'm helping a friend get ready for her kiddo's fifth birthday party, and it's a school holiday for my own kid today. Both things are AWESOME, by the way, because I love love love birthdays, and I love love love having my kid home from school for an afternoon. But yeah, it does change the way things roll around here. Instead of having a non-"productive" morning and then a couple of super-productive hours in the afternoon while the big kid is at school and the baby naps (pleasepleaseplease), I can have, perhaps, a slightly productive day by working all day and including my two little co-collaborators in everything.

First, we make books. I need to fold and sew up 17 blank books for the kiddo gift bags that I'm putting together. During this time, I'm periodically asked to make additional blank books for my own kiddos, who are digging through my cardstock stash and apparently finding gold. The baby dictates a book that goes something like this: "Now a cat. Now a cow. Now a horsie. Now a pig," and the big kid dictates a book about a pony princess who sails the ocean in search of polar bears. Illustration is crucial:

The kids are working so happily that I sneak off into the study to stitch up my 17 blank books, yet something seems awry...

Obviously, what fun is a creative and engrossing activity engaged in on your own at the living room table, when you can run off into the study and squeeze into the three inches of space in between Momma and the wall and run little dinosaurs up and down her arms while she tries to sew?

We did books and blocks and lunch and nap after that. But while the baby (I can still call her a baby, right? She is only two-and-a-half) napped, the big kid and I made some melted crayons with a new mold that I got on big sale--I've been itching to try it out. Although I'm sure it's an enviromental nightmare, I LOOOOVE silicone baking molds. I don't actually bake food in them, but they're terrific for melting crayons:

The mold comes out of the oven and separates from the crayon so easily that it's just pure happiness itself. You can't tell, but this mold is half pumpkins and half leaves. The big kid did all the pumpkins, which came out AWESOME, and I did fall colors, red/orange, orange/yellow, green/brown, with the leaves.

And so after an entire day, here's the party stuff so far:

We have all 17 blank books in the back, the birthday kid's birthday bunting, TWO birthday crowns in the making (the baby insisting upon her rights as the baby, I suppose), and some little tchochkes from Learning Treasures to fill out gift bags. Coloring pages made from the party attendees' names are still in process at my computer, manilla envelopes for the birthday kid to decorate for gift bags are with the birthday kid, the party music mix is being compiled in my iTunes, and a citywide search is underway for the best price for Crayola 8-packs, on account of I do NOT use RoseArt.

And that's the party hero. Party foul--At 6:30 pm, getting ready for Soup Night at another friend's house, the big kid throws a big screaming fit so I, who am exhausted anyway, lie down on her bed and invite her to lie down with me and snuggle. She lies down, sings the continents song to herself a few times, plays with her fingers a bit, and falls soundly asleep. Apologetic phone call is made.

Curse you, Daylight Savings Time!!! Curse you, MyManMitch!!!

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

To Do with my Kids

I've been making this list of Web craft projects to do with kids, specifically projects that celebrate autumn and the harvest season. But obviously, as I'm looking for five or so activities suitable for this list, I'm finding about five thousand off-topic ones that just look AWESOME! So then I was thinking, I have a projects To Do list for myself; why not one for me and the girls?

To Do (Parent/Kid Edition)

• I'm already starting out unrealistically, because I wouldn't buy new silk (from silkworms, you know), and any vintage silk scarves I came across wouldn't likely be all white and pristine and dye-ready, but I still love this tutorial for dyeing playsilks with Kool-aid over at the Artful Parent. The girls love to dress up and the playsilks look so versatile and light and fun--perhaps I could someday find actual vintage playsilks?
• I love the birthday crown tradition over at SouleMama. I mean, of COURSE you deserve to wear a crown on your birthday. The girls would certainly like to help with this, as only they can come up with the perfect garish/creative color choices. Perhaps I'll have one ready for a certain little birthday friend's birthday party on Monday?
• Over at Strange Folk in September, I bought a bunch of beautiful rainbow-dyed wool roving. Since then, it's been draped over a shelf in my study looking gorgeous, but my intention has always been to fill a couple of sinks with warm, soapy water and make felted balls or felted rocks (like these from elsie marley) with the girls. I wonder what else I could felt around?
• For an fundraising art project at her child's school, Perpetualplum made mosaic tiles out of small squares cut from the students' artwork. I'm as a rule quite against altering my children's artwork in any way, but Willow, I think, would be old enough to create art specifically for this purpose, and it would also fall in line with some projects I have in mind to work with the girls' love of Eric Carle--he does this same kind of thing, you know.
• You know that my Sydney is into babies and cars in a big way. I'm not that excited about the idea of making doll clothes for her--she's not really into dolls in a "dress them up, dress them down" kind of way, anyway--but I do like the idea of making her some cloth doll diapers, like these from Skip to My Lou. Natural parenting, right?

In other news, I have a game for you. It's called Find the Monkey:

P.S. Check out my other list of autumn-themed art projects over at Eco Child's Play.

Busy Little Beaver Gets Her Just Dessert

Most of the time I am a total mess, but sometimes, very rarely, I am so organized and pulled-together and crazy-awesome-perfect that I impress MYSELF, friends. For instance, in the past two days, I have made dryer lint modeling dough with the girlsand then I wrote a tutorial for it on Eco Child's Play. I took the kiddos to the park oncetwiceand thriceand while I was there I took some product photos of the holiday quilt that I then listed on etsy. I answered a billion student emails and taught a class on gender stereotypes, although I did break my own heart by harshly reprimanding my secret favorite student (he deserved it). I completed the birthday buntings for oneand two of Willow's little kid friends

and I did that even though Sydney refused to nap today (curse you, daylight savings! Curse you, MyManMitch!). I fulfilled my civic duty

with both children in tow, and I smugly noted to myself, having compared the early voting fervor to the pointless Y2K mass hysteria, that there was absolutely zero line, that the staff was efficient and effective (except for my ballot judge, who was utterly incoherent in her explanation of the voting booth--"And so you...do all this...and when you're done there's some more...and if you write-in you do like that [odd hand-wave]...okay". It turns out that she'd fainted about ten minutes prior but, upon being revived, had insisted upon getting right back to work. Yeah.), and that they gave the girls both stickers and animal crackers. I took the girls to storytime at the public library and then organized their library books

in a new space that Handy Matt created by moving around some bookshelves and hauling a third out into the yard; it will join all the stuff he hauled out of the garage on Labor Day, which he STILL HAS NOT REMOVED!!!!! And, I just finished writing a tutorial for Crafting a Green World on painting vinyl records, a project the girls and I did together this morning before voting and storytime.

Yep, I'm awesome. Except, you know what happens when I'm so studious and multi-tasky and organized and productive? My immune system rebels. And I get a cold. Which is why I'm sitting here at office hours all stuffy and runny and achy, but you know what? I'm still staying up late with Matt tonight to watch election returns and drink champagne.

Go Barack!

Sisters

One minute they're at each other's throats because one child touched the library book that was the OTHER child's choice for Momma to read after breakfast, and while they scream at each other and make "scary faces" (the preferred method of attack, always effective), you think, "What's wrong with them? They're SISTERS. I want for them to love each other more than they love their father and me, to always have each other long after we two are gone, and look at them! They hate each other's guts! They'll fight their whole lives and never be close!"

Then, three hours later, during a picnic lunch at the park, you see this:Sisters.

Handy Matt

Attention, cable TV viewers everywhere! The family and I will soon be appearing on a public access channel near you!

This morning my old friend Christina, one of the friendly neighborhood children's librarians over at the Monroe County Public Library, had us helping to film an informercial about early literacy. I got to be a talking head going on about why I take my girls to storytime and how exposure to books benefits them (being pedagogical helps when being interviewed, although the cameraman at one point did ask the boom operator to move the mike further away from me...ahem. I'm used to projecting to a classroom, people!), and then we all participated in some shots for the "B-roll" to go over disembodied voice footage. Matt read a book to Sydney, Will flipped through some books independently, Syd played with a workbench in the playroom, and Christina forced us to all hold musical instruments and sing together as a family because she needed that particular activity for a shot. Knowing that the footage of us would be soundless (um, right?), I belted out this particular Kimya Dawson household favorite:

After that and bicycling all over town, I retired to finish my slog through my freshman comp student papers, and Handy Matt built a dress-up area in the girls' room, with a rod for hanging dress-up outfits, a big mirror for showing off in front of (to be fronted by a ballet barre at some point in the future), some bins and baskets underneath the hanging stuff for other stuff, and plans for hooks for jewelry.

The man can do anything, right? (...except help the Momma put some clothes on the kids and pose like normal people for a family portrait!)

The idea and basic arrangement of this dress-up area is taken from my favorite blogger, SouleMama, and her awesome book,
I find her really inspirational, y'all.

Festivities, Somewhat

There was a paradeand a whack-o-lanternand trick-or-treatingand tree climbingand more tree climbingand just general awesomeness

and for me, 46 papers to grade, many of which are not at all awesome by any stretch of the imagination.

Here's a little thing I look forward to every weekend, however: the Dover Sampler. I don't remember how long ago I signed up for this, but every Saturday morning in my email in-box I receive a secret link to a site with free pages from Dover books--mostly coloring book pages, which the girls enjoy immensely, but sometimes simple mazes or puzzles or activity pages. Some recent favorites were pages from a birds of America coloring book, a butterfly alphabet coloring book, a famous ballets coloring book, and an activity page on learning to tell time.

To show you how additionally cheap/awesome I am, I'll tell you that whenever one of my print cartridges is almost out of ink, I set it aside and put it in just to print out coloring pages and cutting templates--the kids don't care if their free sample Cats of Siam page is inked in black or pink, don't you know.

Another way in which I'm cheap/awesome? I've never bought my children a coloring book, much less a Dover one.

P.S. Check out my review of earth-friendly children's books over at Eco Child's Play and my tutorial for sewing appliques onto denim buntings over at Crafting a Green World.

Illness and Ornaments and Perhaps a Psychotic Break

One little girl has been sick, sick, sick lately. Therefore, two little girls have been doing this----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.