In Between Teaching, Writing, and Parenting...

I sewed:
So refreshing.

I tend to have a lot of irons in the fire, with a lot of plans for far more irons, so it's easy for me to let myself get really panicky about all that I have to do, and all that I haven't yet done, if I'm not careful:

• LOTS of homework papers that I *should* grade and alphabetize to pass back to my students on Wednesday. It will give me less to do when I'm trying to grade and record final papers, and my students will appreciate knowing their grades up to the final--of course, it will also give them more scope for pestering me with whining...
• LOTS of things that I *should* craft for Luna Fest on Sunday--one set of button alphabets to finish and another that I could sell as a set; several sets of crayon rolls, marker rolls, and colored pencil rolls, allowing me to sell them individually or as gift sets; melted crayons; doily pinbacks, etc.
• A couple of last tutorials, some photos, and a LOT of proofreading and design work on my book proposal, and then having it copied and bound and sending it--I really, really wanted to send it this week. Sigh.
• How great would it be to write a couple of pattern zines to have ready at Luna Fest, and also for my pumpkinbear etsy shop? Wouldn't you totally want a hip, indie zine that would tell you how to make a superhero T-shirt dress?
• If I don't post regularly on Crafting a Green World and Eco Child's Play, then I don't earn my craft supplies budget for the next month. No craft supplies=suckage.
• The Montessori Parents' Library, for whom I am the Parents' Library librarian, could use a Wish List, written self check-out instructions, signage, and CD copies of all the expert lectures that are on--ugh--cassette tapes.
• Speaking of...when did I last update my pumpkinbear etsy shop?

On the plus side, the kiddos are happy and engaged (barring some minor drama with Music Day--how did I manage to convince Will's teachers that I am some kind of rabid stage mom, when the truth is that I don't give a flying flip whether or not she performs the bumblebee song in front of her classmates and parents?), with a mama who helps them put together the velociraptor puzzle and reads the dinosaur encyclopedia to them for one solid hour and makes gluten-free brownies with them in the morning.

Come to think of it, did I eat anything today other than a butt-load of gluten-free brownies? Maybe that explains it...

P.S. Check out my list of eco-crafting tutorials for Earth Day over at Crafting a Green World.

I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

The girls and I spent the day up in Indianapolis on Friday. We hit all my favorites--the Goodwill Outlet Store (I'm saving the INCREDIBLE puppet theater I scored for another post), the opening season of the butterfly exhibit at the Indianapolis Zoo--

--and the Indianapolis Art Museum:
As I was shooting this photo of Willow in the contemporary gallery, and Sydney was happily stomping on the floor just behind me, with another photographer shooting another exhibit in a little niche just behind her, all of a sudden this huge guard starts running towards me, screaming at me to stop right now!

I'm all, "What? The baby can't stomp on the floor?"

And he's all, "You CANNOT take photos in this gallery!"

Without thinking, the first thing I do is whip around, point with my entire arm straight at that other guy taking some pictures in the nook, and shout, "But HE'S taking photos!"

The guard turned around and started shouting at the other guy, so I grabbed both the girls' hands and said, "We gotta go." Then we hightailed it.

Two minutes later, safely down the elevator, I stopped to think about it and I thought, "Really, Julie? You seriously sold out a stranger over a 'no photo' policy?" I can't believe that my instinctual reaction was to throw the blame and then flee. I mean, what kind of person does that?

I actually saw the guy a few minutes later and of course I apologized. He, of course, said it was no big deal, because, you know, it's just a "no photo" policy, not a criminal act, which makes it just even more ridiculous that I sold out a stranger and then ran.

Painting on the grass in the museum gardens was much more relaxing:
Although now I wonder--I hope there wasn't a rule about not being on the grass...

Our New Bible

I am totally wiped after spending the day working on the marketing section of my book proposal (I have one more project tutorial to photograph, but the rain! The rain! It thwarts me!), but Matt was at the library with the girls this afternoon (See? THIRD time this week!)--this was after he had to rush over to Montessori because I, hunched over my computer tapping away about speaker engagements and family-friendly workshops, suddenly had the heart-rending revelation that Willow! We missed her parent/teacher conference! It was half an hour ago!...

...anyway, AFTER the parent/teacher conference (don't worry friends, we have a strategy for Music Day, and the teachers are considering changing the entire format of Speaker's Rug just to slyly trick Willow, who is the only child in the history of the program to have gone two years without speaking once, because she is my baby and she is stubborn, into feeling comfortable enough to speak. It's like Baby Toastmasters in that class), Matt took the girls to the library so I could miserably tap away some more (Writers don't actually like to write, you know. Writers only like to have written), and as he was scanning a shelf of new non-fiction titles, Will pulled a random book off of a nearby shelf and said, "Daddy, I really want you to check this out."

"Oh, yeah?" said Matt, and turned around to see:
Smart kid. They probably have a whole chapter in there about how you aren't supposed to ditch your kid's parent/teacher conferences.

You Can Keep What You Can Carry

This can be my new mantra, since the girls and I went to a program at our public library in which the girls each received, and then got to DECORATE, their very own book bag.

I'm telling you, we go to the library a lot, and the library book problem here at home is getting pretty desperate. Not only do I have my entire bookshelf just for library books that I only return when I absolutely have to, and then when I do return them I just use another card to request them, but the girls have TWO entire bookshelves just for the library books that they, too, have a hard time returning. Even Matt has a little library book problem, although try and get him to admit it.

Seriously, we went to the library twice this week, and both times we came home with a huge stack of books for the girls. Does everyone do that? Are we the kind of family who thinks everything that we do is normal just because we do it, but then the girls are going to grow up and learn that their childhoods were seriously? Messed. UP.

Anyway, the library program was awesome, and not just because our favorite librarian, my dear friend Mrs. Christina, was in charge (she and I were talking about this, like, truck porn you can get for little kids who are into cars and trucks and heavy machinery--it's hour-long videos with just these shots of trucks, you know, and zooming in on the headlights and the wheel wells and watching them spin their tires in the mud, real fetish stuff, but you're not supposed to call kid obsessions fetishes, please remember that).

No, the program was awesome because of all the fabric paint! Tubes and tubes of it, in color after color, the kind you brush with brushes and the kind you squeeze from the tubes directly onto the fabric and TWO kinds of fabric markers! We get there and get our totes, and all the other kids are kind of hanging back like they don't know what to do or they're scared to draw on their tote bag, but my kids are all, "Hell, YEAH!" and in they dive:
I'm not kidding, y'all. It may be hard to notice in this photo, but I'd like to point out that in it, Syd is painting with a brush--in each hand:
We were the first ones there and the last ones to leave. Christina actually had to give Will an old shirt of her own kid's because I couldn't take Will to school looking the way she ended up, in her thrifted Gap velour dress, no less (I'm sure the program notes read "dress to mess," but I forgot to read the program notes).

The cost of mess, though--look at those bags!

How many books do you think will fit in each one? Ten? Fifteen?

Forty?

P.S. Check out my cloth diapering class tomorrow from 2:00-4:00 at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids--new location!

My Avatar is Also a Fangeek

You might remember that directly after Sydney's toilet-training celebration (the new panties, the present, the Baking of a Treat), I bought a butt-load of these little wooden peg people from Casey's Wood Products.

I had always intended to paint them (there are some examples of exquisitely-painted little peg people on etsy, if you're curious), but they are really small, and whenever the girls and I paint...let's just say that we work well with a LARGE canvas. A large big-ole-mess-of-acrylic-paint-everywhere kind of canvas.

However, decorating our wooden Easter eggs with Sharpies went so exceedingly well that yesterday we dragged all the Sharpies (fine and larger points) back out, kidnapped a handful of peggies from the dollhouse, and went to town.

As I'd expected, the kiddos were more interested in experiencing the process of coloring the interesting curves and wooden texture than in drawing "dolls", per se, but after much careful work in which my reach just nearly exceeded my grasp, I did succeed in creating my own little peggie avatar:

I decided to go minimalistic, to disguise the reality that I have no idea how to make proportional arms, or a nose, or even a mouth. Or even eyes, really, so it's a good thing that I wear glasses, because I can totally do those.

But not the earpiece parts. That seemed hard.

We'll do this project several more times, I imagine, so it's my hope that Willow, at least, will eventually want to make her own peggie avatar. If not, though, I plan to recruit my Matt to finish out the family.

Cause don't YOU want to watch your private family dynamics played out by preschoolers in the setting of a dollhouse?

Controlled Chaos (Except for the Controlled Part)

This is what the work table in my studio looks like right about now:I count three different types of craft projects in the making there. I'm hoping to finish up one complete set of button alphabets tomorrow, which I'll likely sell by the letter. I'd like to do another complete alphabet to sell as a set, but it might be nice if at my first couple of craft fairs this season I had something to sell OTHER than two sets of button alphabets, ya know?

Ooh, and a third set just for the babies, but since we have nowhere to put that one it gets to be low priority for now.

I am so stoked for craft fair season.

And garage sale season.

It would be nice to see the sun again, too...

P.S. Check out my post about appraising your vintage stuff before you craft with it over at Crafting a Green World.

Egged

Easter really isn't so much one of my favorite holidays. I'm not religious, so that whole part's lost on me, it's not one of those holidays in which you're supposed to be sitting around on your butt all day if you're not busy cooking a big meal, so it's not really that restful or relaxing, and it takes place on a day that's already a weekend, so basically it just means that some extra stores I might want to go to are closed now.

But I did buy five dozen regular eggs and maybe five dozen more wooden eggs for making all awesome and colorful, so there is that:
We were busy dyeing some of these particular eggs on Friday night. Matt got home from work, looked at them, and is all, "What do you use to dye these?" I'm all, "Um, food coloring?" He's all, "You don't have to use a special kit? You can just use food coloring?" I'm all, "Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's why they put the directions on the food coloring BOX, dear." You see what my life is like, right?

And we didn't even blow out any to decorate--that's five dozen hard-boiled eggs that I'm talking about here. I thought about blowing out some for a terrific fine motor skills activity for the girls, since you have to be so gentle, but I figured that the girls are both too young for it to be at all a successful activity. But then I saw that Chasing Cheerios had her two-year-old painting blown eggs, so there you go. I could be eating scrambled eggs for a week, but no, it's egg salad and devilled eggs and diced egg on salads for me.

Oh, and there's candy, but I tell you, if Matt looks at me nibbling my chocolate and peanut butter rabbit and squeals, "It's a REESEter bunny!" one more time, he is NOT getting lucky tonight.

Of course, there's also the egg hunt. And that's pretty freakin' fun, if you ask me, and I didn't even have my own basket. Five dozen eggs, plus the wooden ones, makes for a sweet hunt for two kids. See? Syd's snapping up the results of our "red" session:
And two happy little girls--

--who have no idea that their diet for the coming week is going to consist primarily of hard-boiled eggs.

Belch.

P.S. Check out my post on how to craft with Easter trash over at Crafting a Green World.

P.P.S. It's so, so wrong that I keep visiting this site, but this particular picture from Why the Frak Do You Have a Kid had me laughing so hard that I could not breathe. It'll take about seven seconds to see what the big deal is, though, so give yourself time.

I swear, though, the girl in that picture looks kind of familiar. Sarah Edwards, that's not you, is it? You're a social worker!