When It's Raining Outside, Jump Around Inside

Most of our local gymnastics studios do this completey ingenious thing--a couple of mornings a week for an hour or so, they open up their entire studio to free play by preschoolers. All the equipment, all the space, all the stuff. At four bucks per kid, it's an activity that's too expensive for me to take the girls to regularly, at least not when there are so many good free activities geared to preschoolers nearly every weekday morning, but one gym, Rising Star, occasionally offers this open play time free for an entire month.

And thus begins our month of regularly-scheduled antics:I never took gymnastics classes as a child, so a lot of this stuff I'm just guessing at, but I think that this long trampoline must be used for practicing floor routines, like flipping and stuff:

The deep pit of foamies is probably a likely landing spot for vaults, jumps, or high bar work, but it also works for belly-flopping and wallowing:My favorite thing about the open play time is that, unlike most of the other activities for small children that we do regularly--storytime at the public library, Discovery Time at Wonderlab, puppet shows and teddy bear tea parties and such--I do NOT bring a book to open play. I wear my yoga pants and my sports bra, and I will happily wait in line with a bunch of three-year-olds for a turn on the giant trampoline. And that time that I got stuck in the pit of foamies and couldn't quite haul my own butt out and that stay-at-home dad laughed at me, I didn't even care.

Because by god, that pit of foamies RULEZ!!!

It's also funny to see how much braver my kids are than I am. Oh, how I long to fling myself from the top of the pommel horse like a cat on a sparrow:Will does any kind of leaping and daredevil work, but Syd seems especially fond of the balance beam these days:And of course, she's perfectly happy to swing for just as long as anyone is willing to push her:So, do they look like they're having fun, or what?

And we get to go back again on Friday!

Kids' Card Making: The Super-Simple Sticker Card

After playing around all they wanted to with the collage cards and the paper doll cards-- --the girls still had just a couple more cards that they needed to make for their Kids Craft Weekly Christmas card swap, so I pulled out the stickers:

I go back and forth on stickers--sometimes I hate them and think that they're wasteful and cause too much mess and aren't a creative tool, and other times I think that they're fun and portable and pretty mess-free and can be used quite creatively. My opinion on this depends, I think, on how many stickers we have in the house and, if we don't have any stickers in the house, how long it has been since we've had some.

The last time I bought foam stickers was last year during a big post-Halloween sale, I think, so there's been plenty of time for their absence to make my sticker-heart grow fonder. And I have been making it a habit (for a while, now, so hopefully it's not just a phase!) to be much more disciplined with the girls and with myself about keeping our environment neat and tidy--and boy, that's a lot of work, but it is nicer not to have sticker wrappers all over the house. Or uncapped markers. Or library books. Or whatever else I used to be too tired to keep up a constant hassle about.

However, with this last sticker purchase the stars aligned, and I bought a LOT. It was one of those Black Friday businesses when I was already at Michael's (I just happened to be there, you know, just to pick up a few things, only to find all these people standing in line just to get in the store! Weird!), and so their entire stock of foam stickers was marked down by 50%, and I had a coupon in hand for an additional 25% off of my total purchase, which meant that each of the sticker sets that I bought for the girls was $3, not including tax.

And that's why the girls have on their art shelves not just the Christmas set that they used to make their last Christmas cards, but, um, a dinosaur set, and an alphabet set, and an outer space set.

And in a month or so, when I am sick unto death of all these damn stickers again, I'll remember that at least I didn't buy the pirate set or the princess set. So there.

Just a Simple Photo of My Girls

The girls' Christmas cards (from their Kids Craft Weekly card swap) are in the mail right this minute, but the very last thing that we needed to do before sending them off was to take a photo of the girls to include with each card. Since neither girl is really up to writing a personal note in each card I thought it would be a nice way to bring them to life for these little recipients who have never met them--and I wanted to sneak in my blog's address, because you know how much I love attention.



I allotted two minutes right before it was time to walk out the door for school for this task--the girls are clean and dressed with hair and teeth brushed, and anyway, how long can it take to snap one decent, normal photo?The winner!
Now all that's left is managing the level of hysterical excitement until our own card swap cards start arriving in the mail.

Kids' Card Making: The Paper Doll Card

The cards for the girls' Kids Craft Weekly card swap are all finished up, and the monkeys are sitting at my feet right this minute writing up some semblance of a signature and holiday greeting (after one card, Willow abandoned her planned "Happy Christmas to all" as too time-consuming and began to make do, instead, with "Will"). When they're done with that, it's the momma's job snap a photo of the two angels looking angelic together and send it to the dadda, whose job it is to add my blog address to the bottom of the photo and print off ten color copies and bring them home to the babies, whose job it will be (with the momma's supervision) to stuff the envelopes and seal them, and then we'll all go off to mail them together.

I had planned to sneak in some geographical learnin' this week all about the places that the cards are going to--everywhere from Australia to Ohio--but I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll be unable to peel the children's eyes away from anything overtly CHRISTMAS!!! this month.

This set of paper doll cards was extremely time-consuming to make, but the girls LOVED it, and worked absorbedly on the activity until they'd run out of doll clothes, which I couldn't cut out from the Cricut as fast as they could glue, especially with all the turn-taking and choosing of scrapbook papers and outfit choices, etc. etc.

You can do this kind of card with any sort of homemade or boughten paper dolls, of course, but since the girls and I happen to be obsessed right now with our new Paper Dolls Dress-Up Cricut cartridge (bought for a song during a Michael's doorbuster, at least, and well worth it), that is of course what we used.

It's tricky to get exactly the right size of paper doll with the Cricut, however, if you're measuring by width, because the Cricut offers measurements only by length. For instance, I didn't particularly care how tall these paper dolls were, but I did need them to be a little less than 3.5" wide, because I wanted our cards to fit in standard envelopes. So I actually had to experiment a little with various heights until I discovered that a 5"-tall paper doll is just a smidge less than 3.5" wide. Fortunately, the girls were happy to take over my mis-fires.

The nice thing about the Cricut, however, is that once you know the height of your paper doll, you can just input that same measurement to cut out all the clothes and accessories that are proportionate to that doll, so I could use 5" for everything from the hairbow to the Christmas tree. I don't use that feature as often with the font catridges, because if I want a single lower-case p, I generally want that p to be exactly the size I want it, not proportionate to the upper case P that I'm not going to print, but with the paper dolls cartridge, it's an extremely useful feature.

I've been playing with using the Cricut cut-outs as templates for making paper dolls and clothes out of recycled papers like magazine pages or comic books, and I have some big plans of also using them as templates to cut out some things for the girls' big felt board, but these Christmas cards are all done with scrapbook paper:
I tried to plan for the cards to be at least winter-themed by asking the girls to choose clothes and things that someone would use in the winter. Sydney was really bad at this, but with her, you never can tell if she's not doing something because she doesn't understand the concept, or because she'd just rather do whatever the hell she wants--either way, it's an activity to repeat a few times. Will enjoyed that aspect of the game, however, and came up with some fun cards:

The card swap is for children of all ages, and whereas when the girls did their Artist Trading Card swap they were sorted into a group of age-mates, here I think that at least some of their partners are quite older than they are. For that reason, I did want the cards the girls' sent to be fairly neatly done and reasonable as Christmas cards, and so although I obviously didn't direct or criticize their work, I did sort the cards into a small stack for the swap, and a biiiiiig stack to send to our own family and friends.

Grandma Beck might better appreciate Sydney's card, which consists of about 40 items of doll clothes glued smack on top of one doll with a big mound of glue, which was then colored on, than some anonymous ten-year-old in Canada might.

When a three-year-old works for most of an hour on ANYTHING, I don't care what it ends up looking like--it's automatically a masterpiece.

Paper Dolls, or, Ode to My Cricut

On Thanksgiving Day, after a DELICIOUS early Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy-schmancy local restaurant (Sydney was all, "Why does that man keep give me more water?" I'm all, "That's a waiter, sweetie"), we finished just in time to load our full bellies into the car and drive across town to the Michael's store, which was opening with its Black Friday sales that Thursday from 5-8 pm. I had the sales flyer, which listed one of the doorbusters as Cricut cartridges on HUGE sale, and an additional coupon for 25% off my total purchase, and additionally, I was stoked that I wouldn't even have to consider waking up early on Friday.

We get to Michael's just a couple of minutes early, and there's a line waiting for the store to open, but up we trek in our fancy clothes, happy to just stand around and digest for a bit. A few other people line up behind us, and then this other lady walks up, and as soon as she gets to the back of the line she starts announcing, over and over, to whoever is listening, I suppose, that she can't believe that there's a line to get into Michael's. She just happened to drive over to pick up a few things, she announced, because she just happened to notice that it would be open, and she never dreamed that people would actually line up just to get in. She didn't even know what was supposed to be on sale, even, and look, she's just wearing the same clothes that she wore to make Thanksgiving dinner.

When the doors finally opened, Matt swears on his life that she shoved him trying to get inside.

I've never been to a store right when it opened for Black Friday before, and it actually was a little hairy, because I guess everybody wanted these pre-lit artificial Christmas trees that were stacked right by the door, but the beauty of being on a team is that I left Matt and Syd to grab a cart at their leisure and negotiate their way in, and Will and I dodged past the tree-hoarders and jockeyed for position in front of the Cricut cartridge display.

The other middle-aged female scrapbookers were sweet as pie there, of course, but were grabbing up cartridges like CRAZY, so Will and I basically grabbed up whatever we were even halfway interested in, too, and then took them all over to a quiet place for a closer look. I was plenty okay with the prospect of walking my unwanted cartridges back to a sales clerk for the opportunity to browse in peace.

I made some very careful choices, spent my entire remaining Cricut allowance (I'm relying on my swagbucks for my Cricut upkeep allowance), and ended up with some cartridges that the girls and I are THRILLED with.

And, obviously, they're the nerdiest of the cartridges. We turned up our noses completely at all the Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh nonsense, and ended up with, along with a couple of awesome fonts, a cartridge that has maps of the continents and countries and various icons from those locations (including lots of farm die-cuts, Willow was delighted to see--now we can make a silo!), a cartridge that does maps of the states AND their correct flags AND their correct birds (this was one of the cartridges that made me want to buy a Cricut in the first place, I'm that big of a nerd), a cartridge that does a massive menagerie of animals, and a cartridge that does paper dolls.

Hell, yeah. A cartridge that does paper dolls.

It organizes them by all these random costumes, so there's a bride and groom, for instance, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and a caveman and cavewoman (I know--whatever), and for each costume it's got a couple of options and some hair and some random stuff that would go with that costume. So, you can cut out a wedding dress for the bride and also a three-tiered wedding cake, and for the caveman you can cut out a volcano and also about four different dinosaurs (hmmm.....who do I know who loves dinosaurs?)

Needless to say, we have been playing with this cartridge ALL WEEKEND.

You can put the paper doll tabs on some of the clothes, but not, you know, the wedding cake or the palm tree or Santa's sleigh and stuff (did I mention that it has Santa and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and the requisite sleigh and reindeer and junk?), so the girls actually prefer to play with everything laid flat on the table, in these little two-dimensional scenes, and they've snookered me into cutting out for them tons of different outfits from scrapbook paper.

Here's one of Sydney's favorite outfits:
It's the shirt and pants to the groom's tuxedo with Frankenstein's hair, I think? And obviously, drawing the features on the doll itself is something of a highlight.

Here's Willow's favorite doll and outfit so far:

I'm not sure why all their doll selections manage to look sort of ghoulish AND sort of tranny chic, but there you go.

Oh, and the woman in the line in front of Michael's? Matt claims that she was checking out at the register next to us (an hour after she went in? So much for "just dropping by for a few things"), and he could hear her telling the cashier all about how she was so surprised there were so many people rushing in here on Thanksgiving, she just happened to be there herself and couldn't believe all those people standing in line before the store was even open, etc. etc.

Yes, lady, it's one of the lamest things a person can choose to do, to stand in front of a Michael's before it's even open, waiting to buy scrapbooking toys, but if you're gonna do it, hell, you might as well own it!

I wonder if I saw her again when I went to Joann's at 7 am on Saturday for THEIR Cricut doorbuster?

A Family Block-Building Enterprise

Our little town's Christmas lighting ceremony, in which the mayor turns on for the season the lights that extend from the courthouse to the roofs off all the buildings on all four sides of the town square, as well as the seasonal streetlights and the Christmas trees sponsored by various charities, has something for every kid. If you're a big kid who's way into the lights and the ceremony and the festivity, then that's what you've got in spades:
However, even if you're a little kid, and you're mostly just about "What is going on right NOW and how will affect ME?"...well, the guy who hands out the programs also has an ample supply of candy canes:We actually stayed in town for Thanksgiving in part, this year, so that Matt could go into work on Friday and save that extra vacation day. However, the Alumni Association unexpectedly (at least to Matt--I'm never quite sure how knowledgeable he is about basic company info like that) closed its offices on Friday, so we've had an extra-long holiday with our man, and we have all been THRILLED. The weekend's not even over, and not only has he cleaned the gutters and enabled me to go shopping ALONE and put up all the Christmas lights, but I can tempt him into staying up late with me much easier with nowhere to be the next day, and he can tempt me into goofing off for long periods of time much easier, knowing he'll be around to help out later.

Matt and I together are even bigger nerds than we are apart, so when we all got out the girls' ridiculously large number of building blocks (seriously, it's ridiculous, and yet if I walked into a Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale tomorrow and saw another thousand, I'd buy them in a heartbeat), while the girls did normal stuff, like build themselves a block city with block buildings and block people and block cars--
--Matt and I had to use the crazy-fancy Kapla blocks I bought years ago at a Wonderlab sale (if you're a block nerd like us, Kapla blocks are where it's AT!) to build a tower that touched the ceiling:Seriously, it touched the ceiling. Here's the view from up there, courtesy of Matt standing on a chair and holding the camera up above his head:I wanted to leave our tower up all night, but Matt feared a middle-of-the-night bathroom trip or curious cat rub that would cause everyone in the house to bolt upright in their beds, so here's the rapid-shot view from my camera, which can take several photos per second:
My favorite part is the expression on Matt's face. Yeah, if he's going to look like that and he KNEW the crash was coming, we were right not to risk a middle-of-the-night demolition.

Kids' Card-Making: The Collage Window Card

It just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV!
It's so fun to have the kids at these ages, because they don't have a huge memory for most things. Therefore, remembering, myself, how delighted and surprised they were to see the huge balloons in the Macy's parade on TV last Thanksgiving, I had my camera ready to catch the new delight and surprise on their faces when they saw the balloons this year.

They didn't really recognize any of the characters that the balloons were supposed to be ("CheeseBob!!!" shouted Willow, when the Spongebob Squarepants balloon came around a corner), but just the concept of HUGE BALLOON is apparently enough to thrill a kid.

Of course, in other ways it wasn't a typical Thanksgiving at all. For instance, our nice big library table, instead of being set for the traditional meal, spent the day looking like this:
All the better to spend the day making Christmas cards with, my dears.

It's been fun to try out several new and different card-making strategies with the girls this month. Some--the window card in which they create their own cut-outs, the window card in which they paint one panel with watercolor paints so that it can show through the window--are complete failures. Others, such as this window card that uses strips of wallpaper in a behind-the window collage, worked great for the five-year-old, the three-year-old, and the 33-year-old.
When the girls do art, of course I like to keep the level of instruction as minimal as possible and just let them go to town with whatever art materials they've got (while keeping intact the rules about not contaminating the paint jars with other colors, not marking on someone else's work, etc.). Even when we do something like this, which is really more of a "craft," I still like to keep the number of instructions and step-by-step directions and parent work down as far as possible. I don't like children's work that is too crafty or obviously parent-directed--there aren't just a lot of ways to make a Santa out of an upside-down white handprint and some red construction paper and googly eyes, ya know?--but I also would like the children to send some Christmas cards that can be recognized as Christmas cards by anyone, not just her parent who can interpret the scenario under which the smear of orange tempera on a playing card was created.

For a full-on collage window card tutorial you can check out my tute on Crafting a Green World, but it really isn't that hard to figure out: tri-fold card, cut-out window, artful collage across that window--

--and a judicious amount of white glue.

And then, once we've got a few of these under our belts (two for Will and one for Syd is about the limit), plenty of time to make even more cards out of leftover wallpaper scraps, pink cardstock, the hole punch, and an extremely generous amount of white glue to hold it all together.