A Visit from a Fairy

Something very important is missing from my daughter's life today:
I know she doesn't look it, but I can assure you, she is thrilled.

We've been reading a lot about various worldwide traditions when a child loses a tooth--I highly recommend , and also asking random children while traveling what they do when they lose a tooth--and that might have addled Willow's brain a bit, because when I asked her if she was going to put her tooth under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy to take, she shouted, "YES!!! She's going to bring me a pinball game!"

Um, no, that's Santa Claus. The tooth fairy brings you fifty cents, and she puts it in your Tooth Fairy pocket:
I sewed Willow's Tooth Fairy pocket from a button-down shirt that both she and her sister had outgrown, and that was sitting in my scrap fabric stash. The buttonhole is original to the shirt, but I replaced the small blouse button with a larger, vintage shank button. The tooth stencil is from Purl Bee, traced onto grocery store freezer paper (which I do not like as much as the fancier stuff from Dharma Trading), and the W stencil is a rubber stamp image painstakingly cut out.

I have some ideas for a new, improved Tooth Fairy pocket in mind (in particular, a more realistic tooth, and a shape that is square, not oddly rectangled, etc.), which means that I'll probaby sew up one for Sydney soon and then write a tute for it.

As for the pinball game? We have the perfect Instructable picked out for that one.

And Now I Move On to Beanbags

A number of infant baby bags made from awesome T-shirts (and one sock monkeys jersey cotton sheet) are now installed at Barefoot Kids:

And now I can move on to the very important matter of sewing beanbags and painting them with freezer paper stencils.

P.S. For my fellow Cricut obsessed, the tags are made with the Indie Art Solutions cartridge, cut out of cardstock and an old history book, with the holes punched by hand. It was a toss-up between the cassette tape and the electric guitar, but I like to keep things real, and I don't play guitar.

I do, however, listen to a mad number of cassette tapes on a daily basis.

Children's Art Materials: Pop Beads are Not Trash

Sometimes you go to the Goodwill Outlet Store and you dig through nothing but trash. Sometimes, however, you go to the Goodwill Outlet Store and, well, yeah, there's still a lot of trash, but also a lot of awesomeness! On one single trip to the Goodwill Outlet Store on New Year's Day, we scored now-treasured possessions such as a huge sock monkeys jersey cotton flat sheet (part of which is now a sock monkeys baby bag, and the rest of which is destined to be sock monkeys pajamas), two Magic School Bus books (you probably have to be between the ages of 3 and 7 to appreciate the Magic School Bus, but wow! It's a big deal), a brand-new My Little Pony still in its box, two bags of Battleship pegs, a tin of antique sewing machine attachments, a huge binder of quilt block templates and instructions, and these funky little things:
I have since learned that they are called Pop Beads. You might think that I would be sturdily against some gendered jewelry-making toy, made of plastic, no less, but I have no quibble here. These things are AWESOME.

Sure, you can make jewelry, with the ring and bracelet findings that come with the set (well, our "set" was contained in an unmarked cardboard box, but I'm assuming that the contents of the box consisted of one set)--

--but this is a really cool and really versatile building toy aside from the jewelry-making components. Sydney prefers imaginative play to jewelry, and so she made all the pop beads that she got her hands on into little people, usually with funny hats. They happily join in to play with the small ponies and plastic dinosaurs.

The only negative aspect of the toy is that the bracelet base isn't sized for an adult man. But Matt gamely sported his beautiful pop bead bracelet, made for him with love, for much of last Sunday, only quoting what one horrible train-wreck mother taught her preschool daughter to say as she was getting spray-tanned and her eyebrows plucked and having false eyelashes applied and fake front teeth inserted on this one episode of Toddlers and Tiaras that we watched--"It hurts to be beautiful."

Willow in the Hundreds

Last night, hanging out at the table with me while I worked on some lists (To-Do before Homeschool: figure out local/state laws; decide on a system; make a PLAN!!!), abacus in front of her, pencil with eraser in hand, Willow completed, for fun, the following worksheet:
I'm not sure what the second graders are like over where this book publisher lives, but as a kindergartner Willow can't be THAT far behind the collective humor, and when I finally read her the answer, the culmination of her hour's work, she was all, "Secretary bird? What does that even mean?"

This morning, as I sat again at the table, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, Willow suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, my math!", and ran to get her abacus, pencil, and math workbook again (said math workbook having been scavenged from the Recycling Center who knows when?). She sat down and, after I explained the first two problems as we did them together, completed the following worksheet:
With that, and as much time as possible playing with small dinosaur figures and plastic ponies, I think homeschooling will go just fine.

Children's Art Materials: Reusable Stickers

If you've ever wondered about any kind of art supply to buy for or use with your children...I have it. I've used it. And I have an opinion on it.

Reusable stickers? Eh.

In theory, they're brilliant. They're usually made of a thin plastic that clings, not sticks, to the plastic-coated play surface that's provided. So, unlike the foam stickers that we have a ridiculous amount of, you can pick these up and put them back, put them on top of each other, and then put them away and play again later.

In theory.

In fact, there are usually some things keeping this from being a really satisfying creative experience, or a really successful toy. For one thing, there's rarely a storage system in place for the stickers. So you take all the stickers off of their sticker page (which it's impossible to return them to--too fiddly) and put them all on the playset--

--and when you're done, then what? If you leave them on the playset, then you can never start your play with a clean canvas, and that hinders your creativity. If you take them off, you might as well kiss them goodbye while you're at it, because how are you ever going to find them again?

I'm also not in love with the concept of the playset at all, and the scene that inevitably comes with the stickers. You're supposed to pose the dinosaurs on their Jurassic landscape, I get that, but what if you want to do something else? Have them marching single file over a rainbow (this scenario gets played out often at our house)? Buying groceries at the Supercenter? Forget about it.

I do think that I have solutions for both of these problems, but I'll have to see if it's worth it to actually make them come to life, since reusable stickers are also prone to getting filthy and ripped as well as lost.

The idea that I'm more excited about is a plan that I have to make some reusable creative surfaces to use with regular stickers. And that's in the queu after numbered beanbags (because Sydney is still struggling with number identification) and one Tooth Fairy pillow.

A Tooth Fairy pillow! Willow's loose tooth is both awesome and gross, all at the same time. Of course, that's how I feel about almost everything involving my kids, so do with that what you will.

Baby in a Bag

Among the other things that I've been doing this week--sledding, seriously considering homeschooling the girls next academic year, cooking dinner after dinner after dinner, reading novel after novel after novel, and watching scary movies with Matt (if one can be said to have "watched" Paranormal Activity if one had one's hands in front of one's face the entire time)--I've also been sewing a part of my collection of awesome thrifted shirts into what are, I guess, newborn gowns, but what Matt and I always called "baby bags":
They're to sell at Barefoot Herbs+Barefoot Kids, our local hippie parenting store, and frankly, I can't think of a better thing to do with the Che Guevara T-shirt that just never quite fit right again after Sydney came to be.

The basic pattern is easy enough, although the lap shoulders gave me hell. After I figured out a cobbled-together pattern for them that worked, however, I made up my own construction technique that is definitely NOT the way you're supposed to do them, and that, and an outrageous number of straight pins (and plenty of Law and Order: SVU on Netflix), gets them done:
The reason that Matt and I so adored the baby bag is in the bottom hem:
Elastic! The gown is meant to be long on the baby, and so the elastic keeps it narrow enough that she can kick and kick and kick happily and not kick off her clothes, but it is the easiest imaginable process in the world to pull the gown up to change her big, cloth-diapered butt.

Of course, the baby bags that Matt and I used were lovingly gifted to us from places like BabyGap, and so they were on the cool side of baby-dom (I think I remember that one had a houndstooth pattern--woo-hoo!), but they weren't as cool as this. Just think--tie-dye! Skulls (Stolen from my own private stash of skull shirts that I'm saving up to make a skull T-shirt quilt out of, no less)!

Awesome bands!

I have a Smashing Pumpkins one, too, that I'm hoping to finish up tonight before watching The Puppet Masters with Matt.

And, um, of COURSE the Great Wall of China:

Don't tell Matt, but it kind of makes me want to have another baby, just so I can dress her entirely in clothing that I've sewn from awesome thrifted T-shirts.

Because if I was pregnant again, I'd TOTALLY have all the time in the world on my hands for sewing newborn layettes, right?

A Girls-Only Snow Day

As Matt was getting ready for work yesterday morning, I tried to get him to stay home with us. The girls, after all, were celebrating an official Snow Day. And the only thing more fun than an official Snow Day is a family-wide Snow Day.

People who are not me, however, apparently have some elusive inner quality called "work ethic," and that is the reason why Matt will never, ever, NEVER use up a single one of the approximately eight hundred sick days he has thus far accumulated.

The girls and I were sad when Matt left, but it turns out that we didn't really need him that much after all--we ate potato curry quesadillas for breakfast AND lunch, read out loud an ENTIRE chapter book), played with every single small plastic dinosaur and pony that the girls own (and that's a lot of small plastic dinosaurs and ponies), and, most importantly, played in the SNOW:

When Matt got home that night (bearing pizza, the hallmark of the guilty-conscienced), he seemed repentant and apologized for not staying home after all. And by that time I was all, "We had a great day! Your day probably sucked, and we didn't even miss you!"

Which might go further than any other strategy in getting him to stay home for the next Snow Day.