The Best Christmas Present Ever

The girls favorite Christmas present, made all the more special because we're celebrating not at home up north, but waaaay down south in Arkansas:
Trickier question--can you guess my favorite Christmas present, the brain child of my most-awesome Matt?

Selective focus, baby!

Season's Greetings

Each little place has its own beautiful holiday traditions. Traveling halfway across the country (top to bottom, at least, not right to left!) is a taxing way to spend Christmas for a vast myriad of reasons, but one of the happiest things about it is that we get to fit ourselves into the festivities of both our own hometown and that of my parents.

For Bloomington, of course, there was the lighting ceremony on the courthouse square the day after Thanksgiving, and this year we'll be back in time for the big New Year's Eve countdown to noon at the Children's Museum. Holiday Trainland at the zoo was inexplicably absent this year, which is a big boo, since it was my favorite thing to do, hands down.

Ft. Smith, Arkansas, on the other hand, with half its residents NOT composed of university students, has WAY more and more elaborate Christmas lights, with the snowflakes down Garrison being especially nice, and it has the huge light display and Christmas train at Creekmore park.

Yep, an honest-to-god train!

Creekmore Park has one of those old-school ride-on trains, complete with conducter and bridges and lights and whistle, that runs around a large section of the park. For Christmas, this section of the park is also decorated to high heaven with various scenes chock-full of twinkle lights, The Twelve Days of Christmas and Santa on an Airplane and Dinosaurs in Santa Hats, etc. Every night in the lead-up to Christmas you can stand in a really long line in the dark and then ride the train and enjoy the lights:

Unfortunately, the night was too dark and the train moving too fast for any of my photos to come out well. But even though this one is blurry, I still think you get the idea:Of course, today is Christmas Eve. But don't worry--it's 11:00 am local time, and we've already been to Wal-mart (it's an unwritten rule that when you live in Arkansas, you pretty much end up going to Wal-mart every single day), where I bought a small set of acrylic paints to use with a kit the girls received for Christmas last night (yes, I upgraded the art supplies that came with the kit--those paints were already half-dried out!), and my mother bought a Playstation 3 for Matt and a bunch of crap for the girls; and Harp's, where Matt bought an orange for each of the girl's stockings and my mother bought three dozen rolls for Christmas dinner.

Future plans for the day include: vacuuming; sneaking out to watch Avatar without the little lichens; painting the craft kit; baking cookies for Santa (who wants gingerbread, and also sugar cookies with crushed Butterfingers); re-reading 'Twas the Night Before Christmas for the billionth time this month, but with extra emphasis; putting the girls to bed with a chapter from some interminably long Magic Schoolbus dinosaur chapter book; and then watching Get Smart from Netflix while Matt assembles the two bicycles that my mother bought for the girls.

And also he'll probably swear a lot.

P.S. It turns out that Papa has been secretly dyeing his dressing yellow with food coloring each year. We only know this because Papa just finished mixing up said dressing, and he's very upset because it seems that he accidentally chose the wrong color from the box this year--pink.

Bambi on Paper: A File Folder Playset

What's the use of having a ridiculously elaborate crafting toy, if you don't find an excuse to play with it nearly every single day?

I've enjoyed making a few of these file folder games for the girls, and although they haven't been often played with yet, the girls tend to go through phases of what kinds of activities they enjoy. Whereas a few months ago they did worksheet after worksheet and activity page after activity page throughout the entire day, lately they've been going through a renaissance of playing out wildly imaginative dramas with each other and their menagerie of toy animals. The time for zealous playing of file folder games will come again.

The girls have been enjoying using Cricut die cuts as characters in their imaginative play, however, so I thought up a combination of file folder game and pretend toy, and came up with this file folder playset from Bambi, which we're currently reading at bedtime (well, we forgot to bring it with us on vacation, so we're currently reading a Magic Schoolbus chapter book at bedtime, but Bambi will be waiting for us upon our return):
I cut blue scrapbook paper for the background on both halves of the file folder, and I cut in cardstock and more scrapbook paper several kinds of trees and bushes and grasses, and several kinds of animals, from the Animal Kingdom Cricut cartridge. This is a Bambi playset, so I focused on the animals that we've met in Bambi so far--three fawns, two does, two bucks, and squirrels, butterflies, and birds.

The background and all the foliage is glued to the file folder--I tried to make a woodsy area and a meadow, and I put a few smaller trees towards the back for some perspective, but overall choosing the correct size for each of these elements was by far the hardest part, especially those dang roomy trees. Stapled to the front of the file folder is a 4"x6" manilla envelope, where the girls are meant to keep all the parts of the playset.

I also used the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge to make labels for the main characters in Bambi, labels that Willow enjoyed using in her playset:
Sydney greatly enjoyed spinning out delicious yarns in her playset, but I learned from her that I need to make all future playset characters from cardstock, not scrapbook paper, because scrapbook paper is only printed on one side. Look how destroyed she is that she can't figure out how to make the deer she's holding face the same way as the other deer:

Of course, there's also a good math lesson in that, I suppose.

The Logic of How Things Sometimes Suck?

St. Louis is for Dinosaur Lovers

Our road trip from Indiana to Arkansas is ten hours long. It's four hours from our home town to St. Louis, Missouri, and six hours from St. Louis to my parents' house.

Thank gawd for St. Louis.

Sometimes we leave for our trip in the afternoon, when Matt gets off of work, and then we stay overnight somewhere and finish our drive the next day. Sometimes we leave for our trip bright and early in the morning, the girls fresh out of bed and still in their pajamas, and we finish our drive MUCH later that evening.

We always, always, ALWAYS stop in St. Louis.

St. Louis, how do I adore thee? I love your City Museum, every last inch of it. I love the zoo, with its insect building. I love Turtle Park. I love Whole Foods and the Container Store, right in the same strip mall. But most of all, I love the St. Louis Science Center, which is in the ASTC Passport Program along with the Wonderlab, and thus affords us membership rights.

Sometimes I'll do my research ahead of time when I know that we're going to stop for a couple of hours at the St. Louis Science Center, to see if there's anything we want to see--we saw Bodyworks there, for instance, and another temporary exhibition of film special effects. Sometimes, however, I don't bother, and then we're simply happily surprised, as we were to show up at the St. Louis Science Center on Sunday afternoon and discover that our membership rights got us half-off into the museum's current temporary exhibit, Dinosaurs Unearthed.

Hmmm...does anybody in this family like dinosaurs?

The exhibit was AWESOME, with plenty of animatronic dinosaurs, and PLENTY of crazy-cool fossils. There were dinosaur heads:
And dinosaur feet:
And even, both girls were DELIGHTED to note, dinosaur poop:There were T. Rex chicks with feathers and T. Rex adults without feathers, and an icthyosaur embedded fossil that Willow recognized by its eye sockets and a plesiosaur fossil that she recognized by its flippers, and even the littlest member of our crew found a shout-out to her very favorite film of all time:
It was the perfect complement to the Land Before Time DVD that they got to watch in the car on the next leg of the trip.

Vegetable Glycerin Soap Redux

I would have liked to have tried a different project this year, but Christmas crept up on us on little cat-feet, and what with gingerbread houses, and final papers, and travel plans, I didn't really even think about organizing a handmade gift for the girls to make their teachers this year until Thursday, the day before the last day of school before the break.

But isn't that what an old standby is FOR?
Vegetable glycerin soap is melt-and-pour, and just about the easiest project that you can get up to with a couple of little kids. One of these days I plan to write a vegetable glycerin soap tutorial for the sole purpose of illustrating how ridiculously simple and awesomely fun it is. The girls and I use regular all-purpose silicon molds, the same ones that we use for muffins and crayons and soap, but the thing that I think is the most fun, and the thing that I think makes this a project that children can make for ADULTS (projects like that are so few and far between), is the stash of essential oils and dried herbs and such that I bring out.

I have a pretty diverse stash, since I use oils and herbs medicinally, for cleaning, in soap-making, and for, you know, scenting baths--very important usage. Each girl, when it's her turn to create a soap, gets to sniff and sample and ultimately choose one essential oil and one herb. The unique combinations are what make the soap so sophisticated, and so fun. For instance, this is vanilla essential oil and dried calendula flowers in a Lego mold:
This is cinnamon essential oil and lavendar flowers in a heart mold--I really liked the combination of this one:

The only one that didn't work for us--I think the only one that hasn't worked EVER--was lemon-eucalyptus essential oil and Epsom salts. I've used Epsom salts before and they've worked fine, but this time they all settled to the bottom of the mold and formed a sludge there that refused to harden. Those are in our own bath right now.

And, of course, a little gift bag made from a single page from an atlas, or a single comic book page, is the perfect size to hold a single soap:

I've used several gift bag templates in my day, but one day soon I'm going to make my own, with measurements that use more measurable increments better--it's very annoying to have to measure 3/16 of an inch, or .8, etc., especially when you're trying to make a dozen of these during one episode of Law and Order: SVU.

And I think that my gift bag will be the EXACT size of a comic book page, not just an approximation. Because in a comic book, even the margins are important.

Baby's First Research Paper

It's been fun to see Willow progress as a kindergartner into a desire for more academic works. I also remember that last year, she focused intensely on academic work in the fall semester at school, but seemed to switch her primary intensity to motor skills later in the spring semester--I look forward to seeing if that pattern holds true this year, as well.

Montessori loves math, of course, and so does Willow, and nearly every day she brings home some examples of bank work, or calendar work, or number stamping work, or work using the number beads, like this one:
To do this work at school, she's had in front of her the actual beads from the bead cabinet, and you can see that she's colored them with the appropriate corresponding color, because each number unit through nine has its own color, and the tens are gold. Then she counted (although later she'll have this memorized) the beads and wrote their total in the box next to them. The addition problems are to help her figure out on her own the pattern that the teens make, and how they're constructed.

My favorite of Will's more recent work, however, is the research project. One shelf in the classroom has fact sheets on various subjects, which the children use to extrapolate the following kind of project:

Willow has chosen one fact to copy--"White-lined bats live in North America," in case you can't read kindergartner--and she's drawn a picture of the white-lined bats (Can you see the moon in her picture? Okay, but can you see the bats?). And up in the corner she's pasted a small map of the world, upon which she's colored in the exact location where white-lined bats live.

Okay, fine, here's the trick--Willow says that the bats are hiding, so she drew them in pencil and THEN colored their environment in on top of them. They are apparently a well camouflaged species.

Made-from-Scratch Gingerbread House, Part Two: Making the Mansion

I'll tell you right now my biggest secret, and my biggest tip, for making gingerbread houses that are yummy and awesome and actually, you know, EDIBLE:

Don't use royal icing. Use melted chocolate.

We saw this tip one weekend when we were all chilling in the bedroom and Matt was flipping the channels, looking for football scores. We passed the Food Network, and there they were showing a giant gingerbread house bake-off. Two teams built plywood houses about six feet tall, but then they covered them in gingerbread and decorated them with candy and stuff.

We watched that show, riveted, for the entire hour, until, I was happy to note, the team with the less creative plan but the vastly sounder construction practices won out over the team that had lots of big plans, but also had cracked gingerbread and unsticky royal icing, and they thew a couple of tantrums, to boot.

But in this show, one team--and then the other, after they STOLE the idea from the team with sound construction tactics--used melted chocolate instead of royal icing. And it was brilliant, I say. Brilliant.

So...bag of chocolate chips thrown into a fondue pot and set to just warm. It takes a little longer to solidify, and at a couple of points in time during the house construction I actually put the houses outside on the below-freezing porch for a few minutes to completely harden, but other than that, it worked brilliantly. For the girls, I used my same kid-friendly construction tactic that worked so well with the haunted chocolate graham cracker houses, and I spooned some melted chocolate into little individual bowls for each of them, and gave them a clean popsicle stick for application. They're both used to using paste (which I HATE) at school, so this was easy for them to master.

Another tip? Don't actually have the small children in the building while you build the house itself. That way they're not driving you nuts while you don't have any hands free, and you're not tempted to go ahead and let them get started decorating before the house is ready because they're driving you nuts.

And another tip? Invite over adult friends, ideally friends without kids of their own, to help out. I invited over three dear grad student friends, and I found that the ratio of two adults per each child was actually about perfect. You have one kid to eat lots of candy and put some random stuff on the house every now and then, two adults to eat a little candy and put lots of stuff on the house, and plenty of gossip to go around.

The end result was a couple of gingerbread houses to be VERY proud of:

I have to admit that Sydney's is my favorite of the two, just because when we were at the candy store buying the candy for this project, each time it was her turn to choose she kept choosing all these weird gummy animals--sharks, millipedes, worms, etc. And so it's pretty hilarious to look at her house just above, for instance, and to notice how there's a shark on the roof, trying to eat his way inside.

And the millipedes have discovered an open window! I don't like the chances of the poor gingerbread children trapped within:I didn't get any photos of this year's gingerbread construction, being too busy gossiping and having hands too sticky with melted chocolate and gummy things, but here's Sydney, directly after hand- and face-washing and at the peak of her sugar high:Very proud of her accomplishment, don't you think?

Will, however, seems to have her eye a bit more on the prize:

After we chose their candy at the candy store in the mall, I had each child take a turn going to stand right outside the entrance to the store, where I could see her, but with her back turned. The other child then had a chance to pick out a Christmas present for her sister, which was immediately given to the clerk and wrapped in a bag in secret. It took Willow about five seconds to choose a gigantic lollipop for Sydney. When it was her turn, it took Sydney about five seconds to choose another gigantic lollipop, but she really wanted this one for herself. I told her that she was choosing a gift for Willow, NOT for herself, that there was no chance on this planet that she would be permitted to take home a lollipop for herself on this shopping trip, and so she let the clerk take the lollipop and wrap it away for Willow, but she was not happy.

Willow has always been a really generous kid by nature--of course, she's spoiled enough with material possessions that she can afford to be--and in the car, then, on the way to school, she spared nary a thought for what Sydney might have chosen for her as a gift. Sydney, of course, has been the younger sister forever, and she's always very concerned about getting her fair share out of life. So in the car, all she did was whine and whine and whine. She wanted a big lollipop. She WANTED a big lollipop. She really wanted a big lollipop.

Listening to this, Willow wasn't tempted to either spill her secret, or to tease her sister about it. She just sat there in her car seat, a huge smile on her face.

But at one point, clearly unable to hold it in any longer, she looked at her sister across the back seat and exclaimed, "Oh, Sydney, I am so excited!"

I can't freakin' WAIT for Christmas.