She honestly hasn't seen The Land Before Time or any of its eight thousand sequels often--a sick day of her own every now and then, a sick day of mine every now and then--but they've really captured her imagination. She pretends about all those little cartoon dinosaurs all the freakin' time, using wooden blocks, or her fingers, putting them into time-out, whatever.I was really quietly irritated about all of it for a while--I mean, here are two kids who can tell a brachiosaurus from a diplodocus and that a pteranodon and a plesiosaur are NOT dinosaurs, and here they are talking about three-horns and the sharptooth and "I'm not a long-neck, YOU are!"
But you know, I finally figured that Matt and I are certainly big enough fangeeks in our own right--comic books, Buffy, sci-fi TV shows--let the kid own her fandom. So while we certainly don't let Syd watch the shows all the time, I did do some web research and downloaded her a DIY mobile, and some masks, and some coloring pages from the Land Before Time web site, and put some easy-reader Land Before Time books on hold at the library, and even checked out ebay to possibly buy her more of those little plastic critters (not for love nor money, apparently).
So, yep, baby's a fangeek. And now the rest of the shout-outs are all about me.
So Matt came home from work yesterday, and sat me down at the computer first thing, and he's all, "Now, Newsarama and Comic Book Resources are the premiere comic book resources, blah blah blah, but Robot 6 is the most popular blog and blah blah blah, and so I was taking a break at work and thought I would check it out, blah blah, and in this one post I was scrolling down, and I see a link to a tutorial for making gift tags out of comic books, and I know you like that stuff, so I click on it, and what do I see? YOU!!!"
I guess Robot 6 was kind enough to pick up my post on Crafting a Green World about making comic book gift tags, and now I have officially impressed my husband.
In other news, I have warned everyone and warned everyone about how bad I am at interviews (this one time, after I won a spelling bee at my junior high, the five o-clock news interviewed me on television, and... it was not pretty), but nilochlainn was nice enough to risk it anyway and interviewed me for the INCrowd Team blog over at etsy. She asks me a lot of interesting, nice questions and I basically go on and on pedantically. Apparently you do not need to get me started about the concept of traditional "women's work."
And if I can go on about that, remember that my official field of study is actually medieval studies, and think about how much more it is possible for me to go on about a single field of study.
P.S. Check out my ode to Artist Trading Cards over at Crafting a Green World.
My favorite thing about doing custom sewing for people is that I'm usually called upon to use color combinations that I normally wouldn't consider--you never could have told me before this project that I would like the combination of lime green, lavender, and rose...
...but after sewing with it, I love that combination! It's youthful and playful and fun without being too childlike--the colors are a little unexpected together, but the fact that they're all pretty light versions of themselves allows them to pop without being garish:
So now, of course, I'm all about the birthday bunting. I'm thinking of adding a listing just for a pick-your-own-colors Happy Birthday bunting in my shop (with a simple symbol on either end as well as in between the words--
--it comes to 16 pennant flags), as well as sewing up a few in some more traditional colors to be able to sell instantly and to show at craft fairs, and I've also, of course, been planning out some bunting ideas for my own girls' 
workout (Five minutes of heel jacks? Really, Maya?) to participate in this meme I found at 
Mind you, the book sale free days are actually really important to me professionally, because as part of my students' work analyzing gender ideologies, I give them each a romance novel to analyze. That's 46 
Really?
Here they are staring in a disgruntled fashion at the shark cupcake in the book because they don't know why Matt can't use my fancy food coloring correctly and made them tan instead of grey--so much for this being a homeschooling moment about sharks:
And the final product--From what unholy marriage consummated in the uncharted depths of the sea did these abominations creep forth?
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder:
It's a tiny little thing on the corner of Lake Monroe, and in the summer it's real redneck-y (trust me--I would know), but in the winter it's deserted. The girlies can frolick and just ALMOST get their feet wet in the freezing water--
--(until they do get their feet wet, and then it's time to go home), and I can have a little walk, and breathe, and remember that there's not much more important in the whole entire universe than those little babies of mine: 
(The fact that they're more than an arm's length away and not screaming at each other right in my face surrounded by the 
--Willow's 
--but for all the tiny little detail work of the tiny little trading cards, I think that Willow found herself much more satisfied, in the end, with colored pencils. She's gotten pretty representative in her work lately--
--and only with pencils, probably, could you create an ATC that deserves a caption like this:
as a canvas for the comics he draws, and I'm thinking about organizing a Kids' ATC Swap on 