Happy Half-Birthday to You

Half-birthdays are always special in our house, what with the half-cake and the cream cheese blended with the last of Cake's mulberry jam to make frosting and all the attendant pomp and circumstance:
But Willow's half-birthdays always tend to be extra-special because they always happen on that one particular long winter weekend when her grandparents, Matt's parents, fly in for a visit with the girls.

And that makes the cake taste even better:
Although the large amount of sugar probably doesn't hurt, either...

Tots on Ice

Friday was an eventful day, what with baking poppyseed cupcakes, listening to Hank the Cowdog books on CD, goofing around at GymPlay, madly scrubbing the kitchen while the girls were at school (WHY did you break, Shark steam cleaner? I HATE you!!!), and then eating a snack in the car and tootling off to ice skating.

Sydney has never been on ice skates before. Willow was signed up for lessons two years ago, but flatly refused to actually attend them, and so I consider this each girl's first real ice skating class. And let me tell you, there is no comedy like the slapstick comedy of Ice Skating-Tot Level, especially on the first day:


Sydney comported herself quite well for a three-year-old on skates still a little too big at the smallest size stocked at the rink (said another woman at the desk as I was collecting our skates--"Oh, those tiny little skates are just DARLING!"), and Will took to the ice like a duck takes to water, so they say. I have visions of hockey sticks dancing in my head.

One of the special activities in the Tot class? When you have down time, you get to color on the ice with dry erase markers!
They don't put this in the manual, but a couple of things I'd suggest if you have Tots of your own: make mittens a contractual obligation, and highly encourage the snowpants.

And bring a book, sure, but the class will likely be too hilarious for you to look away, and anyway, you have to be ready to beam and wave whenever little faces come over to peep at you and make sure that you're watching:Which, of course, you always are.

In other news, my brand-new ipod (Thanks, Matty!) not only allows me to listen to podcasts and show the girls Sesame Street videos when they threaten to fight in public, but also to take videos(!), and hence my Shethecougar (long story) youtube page. Check it out for more antics.

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.