Afghans Aren't Safe Around Me, Either

I freakin' LOVE the summer! I was able to cook, play a dinosaur board game with the girls (Yep, they do make them--we have three), do some yardwork, gaze in wonder at the incredible foods on This is Why You're Fat (I'm not sure if that stuff is supposed to look delicious, but it totally does), blog, and destroy an old, re-gifted afghan in order to sew this completely impractical but soft and summery dress for my kiddo:
I actually even sewed my first pattern for it, sort of. A couple of weeks ago at Thrift Shop (my newest fave, and where I also bought the upholstery sample books that I've been crafting the crap out of), I picked up some vintage sewing patterns that I thought looked pretty easy:

Awesome, right? It's something that I totally know how to sew already, but creating the pattern pieces myself would just be a pain in the butt. Awesomely as well, all the pattern pieces are present! The jumper pattern was even completely uncut until I got my hands on it, although the jumpsuit pattern was clearly well-used, which is also good, because I can assume that it works.

I say that I only sort of sewed to a pattern, however, because I used the front and back pattern pieces for the jumper but I didn't bother with the notches, the interfacing, the buttons, or the instructions--I already pretty much knew how I wanted to sew the afghan, so I'll save the real-live jumper business for later, I suppose.

I'm very pleased with how Will's dress turned out (eventually--it took the entire afghan to get there, which isn't exactly as waste-less as I like to flaunt myself, but now that I know what I'm doing the next thrifted afghan will have a fate that includes at least TWO dresses, and perhaps even three. And also? A couple of bonnets. And maybe a little matching bag).

Which is good, because the baby's all, "Where MY pretty dress, Momma?"

P.S. I FINALLY figured out how to turn my button alphabets into digital downloads. Check out the 8x10 button alphabet digital download and the 4x5 button alphabet digital download over in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

It is Released Into the World

I said I would write a book and lo! a book was written. Well, so far just a book proposal:

Not only was there just your general run-of-the-mill writing, but there were also projects to invent and tutorials to write for the projects, and photos to take for the tutorials, and Matt did a TON of design work for me, from the overall proposal package down to creating diagrams and helping me professionalize my pattern pieces. I don't know how anyone manages to put together a book proposal without a professional graphic designer in her family. It was a CRAZY amount of work, but seriously engrossing, as well, as I'm sure you can imagine.

So today some proposals are wending their way off to some agents who wanted to see one, and tonight:

Champagne?

Disaster movie?

Trip to the comic book store?

Sitting alone and staring at the wall, infused with the feeling of exhausted relief?

It's weird, but I cannot even think of a celebration celebratory enough.

Self-Portrait at Four Years and Ten Months

One of the works at Will's Montessori preschool is Self-Portrait--at its own little table, the teachers have set up a mirror, large papers, and art supplies. At four years and ten months, here is Willow's self-portrait:


I've mentioned before how touched I am by how Willow sees and how she tends to make so beautiful the things that she's seen, but this is the first time, I think, that she's turned that focused sight upon herself.

I have been increasingly interested, though, in how Willow does see herself, because the heart of her latest growth stage has manifested in an hysterical shyness. It's hard to watch, both because I'm miserably shy myself and so I know how small and shameful that often makes me feel, but also because I'm so freakin' proud of my kids, and I can hardly stand it that Will's increasingly unwilling not just to show herself off, but also simply to participate.

School birthday, then, was pretty sad for me inside of my own head. You might remember that last year I cried to watch my kid participate in her class' beautiful ceremony--carrying the globe around the ellipse as many times as the Earth has circled the sun since she was born, listening with her teachers and schoolmates as her dad and I read her biography, standing in the middle of the ellipse while the rest of the class sings the "Tall Tree" song to her. Will did want, desperately, to carry the globe around the ellipse, but she just couldn't hack it. Heck, she could barely stand to even exist in this world while Matt read her biography:
(Excuse my inelegant removal of little faces that don't belong to me. I should have just painted the entire background black, perhaps?)

Thank gawd that school birthday includes a feast of healthy party food, or she probably would have insisted on skipping school altogether that day: I did, however, with no apologies, boot her into the circle with the other birthday honorees so that we could sing the "Tall Tree" song to her. That song is my favorite part of her entire birthday experience, including her real birthday and family party and party with friends, etc. (the walk around the ellipse holding the globe being my second favorite part of her entire birthday experience, OF COURSE). And if I'm going to struggle, in a mere two months, through the making of an ice cream cake with cookies on top, as the birthday child is currently demanding (is it just me, or are the birthday cake requests getting increasingly elaborate each year?), then I am going to have my favorite moment.

I figure you're allowed to tell compassionate parenting to suck it once every few months. Am I right or am I right?

My First Day of Vacay

Ah, the bliss of the first day of summer vacation! I don't know how y'all non-teachers can handle your lives without the prospect of a 3.5 month break every year.

Wanna get jealous? Here's what I did on my first day of summer vacation:

I get up, Matt makes me some coffee, I drink it while reading Margo Rising, my newest web obsession--it's a snarky review, in order, of all the Sweet Valley High books. I did not realize during my young teen years, when I was reading those books for real, that Jessica Wakefield is a sociopath. She is, though. Cold, dead blue-green eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean and all.

After Matt goes off to work (poor dear), the girls and I spend HOURS making my Papa's biscuits. Seriously, hours. The dough was well-kneeded, I assure you:
They turned out pretty well, I think, considering that I used olive oil instead of Crisco and whole wheat flour instead of self-rising white and regular milk + vinegar instead of buttermilk. Oh, and I burned them.

So we eat ourselves some biscuits and then we go outside, where I do a RIDICULOUS amount of heavy yardwork. Seriously, I was literally gasping for breath after struggling with our reel-powered motor back and forth across the random, uneven hill in our side yard. I didn't even get anything planted or weed-whacked, which were my other goals for the morning, although the sunflower babies are up and so we can plant the cranberry beans now, and we have the potting soil that Willow's bachelor's buttons need, finally.

Back inside, I make the girls a lunch that they do not eat and bully Willow through dressing for school, tooth-brushing, hair-combing, shoe-tying, etc. Sydney plays until Matt gets back from taking Willow to school, and he puts her down for a nap while I eat cheese and bread and barbecue Baked Lay's leftover from the previous night's drive-in date.

I spend a while making some text changes and futzing over the book proposal, which I have GOT to stop futzing over and just mail, for Christ's sake.

The laminator is still out from when I was making craft fair signs (I looooove my laminator), and so I experiment with laminating some comic book panels I'd cut out. I am very pleased with how they turned out:It's a way to use them but keep them archivally safe, and unlike the comic panels backed with acid-free cardstock that I put in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, you can see both sides of the comic book page on these. After I experiment some more, I might add these to my shop, too.

While I cut out the laminated comic book panels, I catch up on Dollhouse and The Office on Hulu.

When Syd wakes up from her nap, I get her dressed and we go get Will from school. I want to go buy another printer ink cartridge after that (I swear, everytime I print something I feel like I am bleeding money), but Will has to pee and Syd is thirsty, so we just go home. The girls run in and out of the house and play for a couple of hours while I do some laundry and some dishes and look under couch cushions and behind the bed to try to find all the library books that are overdue.

When Matt gets home, I enlist him into FINALLY moving my compost bin to where I want it to be while Willow and I mend my jeans:
She's getting pretty handy with the seam ripper.

While I go inside to finish mending my jeans I let Willow borrow my camera to take some photos outside, and later I find some nice photos on the camera--
--and also all these photos that imply that she'd been running around the yard sticking my VERY expensive camera into holes and garbage cans and underneath the back porch, etc. Shudder.

We need to cook some ears of corn so Matt makes burgers while I straighten the living room and the girls play a "math game" on the computer:
Don't tell them that their "game" is just flash card drills, because they LOVE it. I set it to just give them arithmetic problems in the ones and twos because I'm encouraging Willow not to necessarily work the problem each time, but to see if she can remember the answer from the last time she worked it. Oh, and she accidentally wrote The Devil's Number:

Matt and I laughed and laughed, but don't even bother explaining to a kid why it's funny.

During dinner it turns out that Matt forgot to actually cook the corn, so we'll likely have burgers again tonight.

After dinner I wrote up a Crafting a Green World blog post about mending my jeans while the girls laid down with Matt and fell asleep while he played video games. I went in there like an hour later, only to find Matt sound asleep, as well. So I read some Neil Gaiman comics in the other bed.

Matt did wake up from his nap later, but that's another story...

But What Does It Look Like to YOU?

So I'm grading some final papers in the study, while the girls are playing outside and Matt is working on my book proposal on the other side of the table, and I'm separating, as I go, the students' copies of their secondary sources that they've paperclipped to their final papers, when I see:
"Oh, my GAWD!"" I shriek, thrusting the offending paperclip out at Matt. "Where on Earth do you think my student found THIS? I can't BELIEVE she thought that was appropriate!"

Matt is very busy, and so he barely looks up before getting back to work, and he simply says, "It's supposed to be a dog bone, Julie."

Oh. Yeah, I can totally see that.

In other news, WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!! My final papers are graded and my final grades are submitted, and other than answering student emails complaining about said grades, my summer has BEGUN! The level of bliss that I am experiencing is quite incomprehensible.

I did SO MUCH awesome stuff today, the first day of my summer vacay. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow, but here's a sneak peekie: check out my tutorial for mending a hole in your back pocket so that your ass doesn't hang out of your jeans, over at Crafting a Green World.

That's My Daughter, In the Water

Dedicated to all mothers, of course, but most particularly to the mothers of little girls:

My Mother's Day celebration? Breakfast at the playground this morning, followed by heavy yardwork, continuing momentarily into painting on the back porch, and finished off tonight by a trip to the drive-in.

Perhaps we'll listen to Loudon Wainwright on the way there...

Caterpillar

"Momma! Momma!" Willow yells, barreling up to me as I transplant ditch lilies from one garden to another (both in the quadrant of front yard that Matt resents me for planting in, as we both know it's the best part of our property, and HE dreams of a baseball field-like expanse of green lawn). "I found a CATERPILLAR!"

Obviously, I run for the camera (as if Willow is not finding caterpillars and roly-poly bugs and earthworms and grasshoppers all day long, each one the subject of its own photo shoot), and spend several minutes taking photos of the caterpillar, as Willow, an old hand at Momma's photography, does her best to show it off in the best light and at the best angle.

When I'm finally finished and about to stand up and pick my shovel back up, Willow says, "Here, Momma, you hold the caterpillar now, and I'll take YOUR picture with it."

As if the caterpillar is some sort of celebrity, and we're the fangirls with our cellphones out begging for pics.

I hadn't thought of having my photo taken today, or of holding a caterpillar in my dirty hands, but I do what my daughter tells me, and she takes my photo:

I feel good about myself, seeing me through her eyes.