Merry Christmas to All!

Wishing you a holiday filled with MANY more smiles than screams!

Tutorial: Painted Wooden Christmas Ornaments

We usually make the Christmas presents for the girlies' California grandparents after Christmas, so that we have the pleasure of giving them to them in person during their yearly visit to us in January. However, this year two of the recipients of gifts that we mail before Christmas--two little cousins, and my awesome brother-in-law--were going to be at that California grandparents' house for Christmas.

Well, you can't send a box full of Christmas presents to somebody's house, and there's not even a single Christmas present in it for that somebody!

We had to put in a little homemade love for Grandma Janie and Poppa, and here's how we did it.

You will need:

•  craft acrylic paints (and a metallic Sharpie, if you long for extra fanciness)
• wooden two-dimensional shapes
• drill
• yarn or twine

1. Have your little critter paint all the wooden shapes to her heart's content. Acrylic paint dries pretty quickly, so you ought to be able to paint both sides in the same session:

Don't you just love that little pot belly? Can you see where she drew on herself with markers? That's her piano, and yes, she plays her belly and sings.

2. Let the paint dry completely:

 If you like, you can add additional details with paint pens:

The narrow edges of the wooden shape are hard for a little kid to paint, so I neatened them afterwards with a metallic Sharpie along the edges:

 When the paint is all dry, they're all good to go...

 ...except they need holes! Drill a hole near the top of each shape, and then tie a nice piece of twine or yarn into a loop through the hole, perfect for hanging from a Christmas tree--

--or a cutie little finger!

Edible Chess: Food for the Mind AND the Tummy

My library copy of Candy Construction is a dangerous book to leave around when there are little readers about. We've already made the Rice Krispy Treat Christmas trees (perfection!) and the edible chocolate play dough (the messiest project that I've ever made, and it didn't even turn out that great, but I'm going to give it a second shot, anyway), and when Willow spied the edible chessboard, it didn't take long before Sydney and I were in the kitchen, mixing up a big batch of made-from-scratch brownies and a big batch of made-from-scratch blondies.

The brownies and blondies are supposed to be cut into perfect squares, then arranged in a chessboard pattern. Willow cut all the treats into (sort of) identical small squares--

--and then Matt helped them arrange the pieces into chessboard formation on our extra-large cutting board.

And then, to play!

 
Often, when Will and I play chess, Sydney wants to play, too. Sydney and I play as a team, and we take turns making the move when it's our turn. This evens out my play with Willow quite a bit, because I can guarantee you that if I have a tricky little trap set up, Sydney will sacrifice my queen or expose my king before I can spring it:

 It took a lot of persuasion to keep the girls from nibbling away the chessboard while we played just one game:

By the second game, we made up a rule that if a square gets eaten, then it no longer exists as part of the chessboard. That's a rule that's sure to liven things up! It has excellent strategic potential:

It probably wouldn't surprise you to discover that there wasn't enough chessboard left for a third game.

Best Friends

 
 
 
 
Life is especially good when you have a kitty to snuggle with on your way off to sleep.

Tutorial: Create a Custom Envelope for a Quirky Card

I have SO many envelopes in my stationery stash, and the real take-home lesson here is that the next time the girls make handmade cards, I will cut down the greeting card blanks that I make for them to the size of envelopes that I already own.

Fortunately, we have many half-used and abandoned handwriting sheets lying around (the children do enjoy copywork, correctly presented--more on that another time), and it is exactly that, or a similar large-format sheet of scrap paper, that will make you the perfect custom envelope for your own quirky card in about one minute.

First, lay the card centered on the paper, but closer to the bottom edge than I have pictured here:

Fold the sides in.

Fold the bottom up:

Fold the top down at first one corner--

 --and then the other:

Now go back and secure all the edges with double-sided tape. Also use double-sided tape to fold the top flap down over the envelope:

Ready to mail on Monday!

Poetry Speaks: "'Twas the Night before Christmas"

I have a mind that latches onto catchy verse and rhythm. Commercial television is hell for me, because I accidentally memorize every jingle--just ask me and I'll sing for you the "Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame-seed bun" song, and the Empire Carpet telephone number song (588-2300, Empiiiiiiiiiire!), and the Alka-Seltzer jingles, both old and new. I memorize every theme song to every television show, and every legible lyric to pretty much every song that I've ever listened to more than four times.

I also like to memorize poetry.

I wanted to share my love of poetry with my girls, and I also wanted them to begin early on to practice memory work as much as possible--an excellent memory is an invaluable ability, and the possession of an excellent memory will aid their lives and give them joy in who knows how many ways.

And so I've started this month with the plan to introduce to the girls one long poem each month. The poem has to be available in a picture book format (which many excellent poems are), because the key component of their memorization is the inclusion of this book every single night as part of their bedtime stories. For the first couple of weeks, Matt or I read the book out loud to the girls together. After the girls seem to start being familiar with it, we begin to do the book with each girl indepedently at bedtime, inviting her to recite the poem while looking at the pictures, and prompting her when necessary.

Driving around in the car is also a good place and time to ask a kid to recite, or to start reciting, myself, and we can all prompt each other. The girls adore this, by the way--it's very fun to show off what you know, don't you think?

With our current poem, "'Twas the Night before Christmas," I've shown the girls a couple of cartoons of the poem, and I downloaded for them an entire "'Twas the Night before Christmas" coloring book to color--both activities were nice, but not really critical. Much better was our visit to the Santa Claus storytime at the public library--one of the librarians recited "'Twas the Night before Christmas" to the auditorium full of children, and my kiddos, mistaking it for another of the sing-alongs that we'd just done to "Jingle Bells," recited the entire poem along with him. Loudly, to the amusement, fortunately, of the other moms around us.

Another nice benefit is that Willow has asked about the parts of the poem that she didn't understand, and so I got to explain metaphor with "the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow," and simile with "as dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly."

Now that both girls have the poem almost memorized, they both enjoy reciting it while I videotape them, and then watching themselves. They do this over and over and over. It's at the point now where perhaps I'm secretly getting a little tired of "'Twas the Night before Christmas," but the girls are most definitely still in the groove, so on we go!

I really had meant this project to encourage Willow to memorize each poem, and Sydney, as always, was intended to just go along for the ride. I am deeply surprised, however (and thrilled!), to discover how much Sydney has, in fact, picked up. And so, for your consideration and Christmas cheer, I bring you Sydney's recitation of "'Twas the Night before Christmas":

Next month, I think we're going to do some Robert Frost. Or do you have a suggestion for something else that we'd like?

Three Squares a Day

Breakfast

 Leftover pasta with kale and a little nub of parmesan, perfect for grating over one's plate.

Lunch

 D.I.Y. peanut butter sandwich, with an orange for dessert.

Dinner

Pizza baked from scratch out of Magic Bread (bake the pizza for only 20 minutes, instead of the 30 minutes that a loaf of bread requires), with pesto made from my home-grown basil, more kale, pine nuts, soysage, and a cheese-stuffed crust to please the kiddos.

After dinner, the girlies tend to enjoy a little quiet mental work while the dad and I flip through the newspaper and gossip:

And that's how we are nourished today.