Make-up Just for Them

Ugh, I know--it's nothing but down the rabbit hole for me these days, but Willow, who was the most AWESOME big sister/stage manager/perfect daughter during every single part of Sydney's fashion show experience, declared that she was jealous of exactly two things having to do with the event:

1) The mom of Sydney's little runway walk buddy gave Sydney treats (in particular, a piece of yellow gum and an M&M cookie, and did not give treats to Willow
2) glitter make-up

As for the treats, I explained to Willow that little children who want to be given something that their sister is being given should leave their books when treats are being handed out and stand next to said sister, smiling expectantly. And also, she didn't even play with that kid! If you don't play with a kid, you don't just automatically get some of that kid's treats. It's a fact, and everyone knows it.

As for the glitter make-up, however...it's a valid point. I could tell when Syd was having her make-up done that Willow wanted some, too, and oooh, it was sparkly. And that's why I spent $50 of the grocery budget (I fixed beans, rice, and baked corn tortillas for dinner THREE TIMES this week! And another day I fixed oatmeal!) on glittery make-up at the drug store, and gave it to the girlies, telling them that, with supervision, they were welcome to play make-up artist anytime they wanted.

Willow, of course, was granted first place in the make-up chair:

Sydney, channeling the make-up artist at the Hair Arts Academy, said to Willow, "Make a kissy-kissy face!"

I bought glitter lip gloss, glitter fingernail art brushes, blush, eye shadow--

--glitter eye shadow, and then just some extra glitter to throw on top of everything.

Part of the fun, for me, was watching each girl eagerly, trustingly, and happily put herself into the hands of her sister for her makeover:

You can't tell from the photograph, but Sydney is looking straight into Willow's eyes here, just as adoringly as she used to do when she was a baby:

Willow's make-up ended up looking pretty sedate, actually, but she, herself, has always had a flair for the dramatic, and Syd ended up ready for the stage lights once again:

You can see the glitter this time, can't you?

Make-up is something that, for me, makes me really uncomfortable. It takes me straight back to junior high, when on the first day of seventh grade I noticed (because some bitch teased me about it) that all the other girls had apparently spent the summer between sixth and seventh grades buying clothes from the mall and learning how to feather their hair and put on too much make-up. I'd spent my summer dealing with my mother's suicide attempt and being taken to visit her at the psychiatric hospital, thank you very much. I never felt in step with my peer group again, and I never put on make-up, and I never feathered my hair (although my Aunt Pam did once, and then she took a photograph, and it's still one of my favorite photographs from my childhood, because damn it, I look so NORMAL on the outside!).

Needless to say, that's not what I want for my own children's childhood. So far, hair and make-up have no gender stereotyped connotations for them--they don't watch Disney princess movies, or commercial TV, and they don't go to public school. The only time that they've seen hair and make-up being done is for the fashion runway, and it was wild, and imaginative, and playful, and, dare I say, immensely empowering.

Funnily enough, that's exactly how I would describe my kids, too, my kids who play with make-up.

Trashion/Refashion Show 2011

As far as I can tell, Sydney was never nervous for an entire second.

Me, on the other hand? I was so tense the entire week leading up to the fashion show that I sprang a muscle in my neck brushing my hair one morning. The morning of the fashion show, I ate a nice breakfast, then decided that eating was probably a majorly bad idea.

Basically, I was that kind of nervous in which you sort of feel like you are going to die, you are so nervous.

For Sydney, however, the day was basically just a series of one candy-colored piece of happiness after another. Thanks to the Hair Arts Academy, which donated its services, there was hair styling!!!

Just check out that kick-butt booster seat.

Syd doesn't really have enough hair to bother, in my opinion, having it curled to peek adorably out from under her crown, so I asked the stylist to simply braid it in pigtails, pin it up, and lock it into place, thus introducing Sydney to the wonders of scented hair-spray:

Designers were also permitted to have their hair and make-up done, I believe, but notice, please, that this Momma has her hair firmly braided and hid in a kerchief, and her face firmly placed behind the lens of her camera:

On Sydney's face, I asked for dramatic pink eye shadow and pink lip gloss. Sometimes kids don't like to have their make-up done (can you blame them?), but seriously, look at the expression on my child's face as she's getting her eye shadow applied:

When the stylist is done she asks me if it was the look I was going for, and I say, "I LOVE it, but you've got to get Miss Syd's approval, too."

The designer gives Sydney a hand mirror and asks, "Do you like your make-up?"

Sydney checks herself out from all angles, smiling at herself all the while, then looks up at the designer and says, "Glitter."

Did they have glitter? Why, yes, as a matter of fact they did!

The glitter didn't photograph for me well, but it's brushed all over her face, so imagine it on top of this, The Runway Look:

She's making that face because she doesn't want to close her lips together because she doesn't want to smudge her lip gloss. Seriously.

While Will and Matt had tons of fun out front with the hula hoop troop and the community art project, Syd was busy with the backstage photo shoot:

 She goofed off and giggled with her little runway buddy--

--and had some time to contemplate the less fabulous and more tedious aspects of modeling, such as waiting for the shindig to begin, already!

Finally, it was time. I had my game face on, but frankly, I thought that I was going to puke. I would have vastly preferred walking the runway myself, naked, to sending my four-year-old down it completely unsupervised and at the mercy of her own common sense. To make matters worse, when you're backstage, you can't actually SEE onstage--what if she falls and then begins to cry? What if she just stands there for a really long time, and then begins to cry? What if she just wanders off, crying?

Fortunately, I had my man in the audience, bootleg taping the whole thing. Here's what he saw:

Sydney's little runway buddy was the real trooper, since Sydney, who knew her marks VERY well, did her darned best to haul her partner around and keep them both exactly where she wanted them to be. And yes, Dear Reader, at the end of the walk, she does blow a kiss to the crowd. I didn't spend all those evenings with cable watching Toddlers and Tiaras for nothing.

At the end of their walk, off they march:



And then back in line we get, because our portion of the evening isn't over until we've walked the Models and Designers Walk:

No, I'm not escaping--we were required to hoof it back to the Silent Auction area and schmooze for a bit. Syd was still wired, happily collecting her bouquet from Daddy and letting people examine my stitching and hems and all up close and answering questions from the admiring public, but Will, who had won the award for World's Most Patient Big Sister hours ago, was getting pretty exhausted, and so off we snuck back home.

The small child refused to let me take off her make-up, but she did let go of her bouquet so that it could go in water, and she and Willow were sound asleep approximately six second after their little blonde heads hit the pillow.

And that's when Matt ordered a pizza, and I FINALLY relaxed.

The Sidewalk Chalk Fashion Show Runway

Don't laugh if you knew this already, but fashion shows are kinda complicated. You walk here, you pose for this long, you walk somewhere else, you pose, you walk fourteen other places and pose there, you look in the right direction, your face has the right expression, you don't watch your feet and also don't fall off the runway, you smile at the audience but ignore the emcee who's talking her head off about you while you're right there...

See? Complicated!

I don't know about the adult amateur and professional models who are participating in the fashion show, but my four-year-old needs plenty of practice.

Fortunately, we live just a few houses down from a fabulous park, and even more fortunately, we homeschool, and so we can visit this park during school hours.

Why is it so important that we go to the park during school hours?

Because during school hours it's just us and the toddlers at the park, and the toddlers don't play basketball.

While I drew a copy of the fashion show runway on the basketball court (a great quad exercise, by the way--at the gym later that night I climbed onto the elliptical, started up, and then was all, "Ow, ow, ow! Why does it feel like I've already exercised these muscles today?"), the girls added some decorations of their own:

Stegosaurus, by Willow

Bunnies, by Sydney

Sydney's bunnies were so awesome that Willow, upon seeing them, accused me of drawing them for Sydney, at which point Sydney then drew a few more just to demonstrate her bunny-drawing aptitude. Ahh, sisters!

In case you've never modeled in a fashion show before, here's what Syd's runway debut will look like:

She and another four-year-old, who will be modeling a dress crocheted from unraveled sweater yarn, will enter the runway together from the steps at stage right as soon as the stage manager motions them on. They will walk to upstage center and pose:

Willow invented this pose, by the way, and taught it to Sydney, and will teach it to Syd's partner at their next dress rehearsal. It's called the T Pose, and it's the one that I chose from all of Willow's possibilities--the P Pose, the H Pose, the W Pose (which involved the children each standing on one foot), etc.

The girls will then walk to center stage, turn completely to stage left and pose, and turn completely to stage right and pose:

They will walk downstage to the end of the runway and pose at downstage center:

They will walk all the way to downstage left and pose:

They will walk all the way to downstage right and pose. They will walk back to center stage and pose left and right again. They will walk back to their original mark at upstage center and face the audience again for a final pose (I'm having them blow a kiss, a tactic that I unabashedly stole from Toddlers and Tiaras). And then, and this is actually the trickiest part, they will exit not from the stairs they used to enter the stage, but from the stairs at stage left.

Wouldn't you want to practice that?

The Fashion Show Project: What to Do with a Broken Zipper

Minutes after a photo shoot, I say to my ham-handed, though ever helpful husband, "Please get Sydney out of her dress."

I'm busy fiddling with something else, so time passes, but when I finally turn back around to him, there he is, with his hand on the zipper to Sydney's Trashion/Refashion Show dress, and a look on his face that must be genetic, because I see it every day on the faces of our little girls when they are caught in the act of doing something very, very naughty.

"What?" I say.

"Um, the zipper," says Matt. "I broke it."
I don't know how he could have thought that pulling that hard was how the dress was supposed to unzip, but my man, he managed to break the zipper pull in half and rip it off of the zipper. Yikes.

Do I even have to mention to you that the very last thing in the world that I want to do is tear out the invisible zipper on that dress and sew a new one in? The VERY last thing in the world? Especially when, if I'm being completely honest with myself, I did make an error with my seam allowances and the dress is already just maybe a millimeter too snug for my liking?

Hmmm, hmmm. What to do? What to do? Thinking... Thinking...

Hell, the fashion show jury already thinks that my kid's outfit is too sexy. Might as well add a lace-up back to the mix!

I hate, hate, HATE my snap setter, which bends my snaps every time I try to set them. From what I've read, this particular snap setter does work for some people (though not for most, I wager), but it apparently takes a lot of practice and futzing and the reading of extra tips on line, which I do not currently have time for. However, it punches grommets like a dream, and so given a choice, I often make lace-up stuff, as in the following:

First you take off the rubber rings and use the pokey part of the tool to punch a hole in your fabric:

Trim away the bits of fabric that you just punched out, then set the eyelet or grommet in the hole, with the finished-looking flat side on the right side of the fabric and the pokey side poking through the hole into the wrong side:

 
Set up the pliers so that the flat side of the grommet is against the pokey side of the pliers, with the post going through the hole in the middle of the grommet, and squeeze the pliers together:

Perfect grommet!

What, you didn't want to see the finished dress, did you? Well, I'm not putting that dress back on the baby until fashion show dress rehearsal, so you're just going to have to wait.

Color Mixing Math

We don't study every subject every day. We don't study every subject every week. Take math, for instance. After the math grid obsession of several weeks ago, the girls didn't touch any purposeful math activity for weeks afterward.

Sure, they built with LEGOs and blocks. Sure, they did math games on Jump Start. Sure, they played Quirkle and Sorry and Monopoly Junior. Sure, they helped me mix and measure in the kitchen. That's all math. But neither girl felt like doing any traditional math exercises--no Cuisenaire rods, no pattern blocks, no worksheet pages, no abacus, no computation, no word problems. So we didn't.

Everything comes around, however, and if you give it time, everything gets done in its own time, and if you give a kid freedom and choices, eventually she'll choose everything. This I believe.

And that is to explain to you that we are now in the midst of a math renaissance. There are Cuisenaire rods. There are pattern blocks. There are worksheet pages. There is the abacus. There is computation. There are word problems.

There's a new computer math game that has the girls entranced (We're doing the free two-week trial of DreamBox, and so far it's a hit).

Will had me find and print different dot-to-dot puzzles from the internet, because her 1 to 100 dot-to-dot book has grown too familiar.

Sydney declared that Jump Start Preschool was "easy and boring, and I've played all the games," so up she goes, and she's now a kindergartner.

When the girls begin to make these kinds of choices, then I know to offer them more purposeful math activities as projects. I have an actual list, on account of I don't like to have ideas live only in my head. When a kid comes to me and wants to do something together, but she doesn't already have a project in mind, I read to her from the list.

4. Color mixing with food coloring and water.

To do this project, Sydney helped me drag every clean Mason jar out of the cabinet and fill it with water. To color the water, we didn't actually use food coloring, but the True Color Tablets from Steve Spangler Science, a Christmas present for the girls from their Grandma Beck.

We played with these tablets a LOT of ways:

I wrote out equations/recipes:

The girls had to follow the recipe to know what color answered the equation:

 
They also REALLY enjoyed making up their own complete equations:

 
 The tablets fizz as they release their color, so it's quite exciting to dump them in then watch to see what you've got:

 To write their equations, both girls wrote out the numbers, but had a lot of fun choosing just the right colored pencil and coloring a swatch instead of writing the color words:

Of course, then the project moved to just dumping in a bunch of color tablets and seeing what muddy dark colors they made, which I allowed this time just for the process of it, but the next time that I purchase the true color tablets I think I'll require them to limit themselves to no more than three tablets per glass jar--more than that, and the color gets too dark to tell what it is.

After every clean Mason jar in the house was filled with colored water, do you think that we just poured them all back out again?

No, we did not! I had a special project in mind for all that colored water, which I'll show you later...

Penguin, Bunny, Boy

The thing about making custom baby gowns is that every time I make one, I think, "Oh, my goodness, this is the most stinkin' cute baby gown that has ever existed on this Earth:"

The babies, themselves, are also pretty stinkin' cute, or so I hear.

Homemade Peanut Butter

Sydney has been so obsessed with peanut butter lately. Seriously--peanut butter toast for breakfast, peanut butter toast for lunch, peanut butter toast for snacks in between. Her little body must be craving the fat and the protein, because I can tell that she's in the middle of a growth spurt, but still, that's a two jar a week habit that the kid has!

To turn her love of spreadable legumes into a homeschool science project, I bought a bag full of raw peanuts from the bulk bin at the grocery store. Syd poured them into our blender, turned it on--

--gave it a good mixin'--

--and made peanut butter! If you don't own an overpowered blender like we do, you'll likely need to add some peanut oil to the mix to help it blend, but we could grind up a car in our blender if we wanted to.

Sadly, Sydney does not prefer our homemade peanut butter to the store-brand organic jarred peanut butter that I usually purchase. Even more sadly, I did not purchase any more jarred peanut butter during my last grocery run, since I knew we were going to make homemade peanut butter, and there's not another grocery trip in the budget until April, alas.

Ideally, Syd will develop a taste for the homemade stuff. She's also intrigued by my demonstration that with homemade peanut butter, you can blend yumminess in. Strawberry peanut butter, anyone?

I may have to get out the big guns and make honey peanut butter next. Maple syrup peanut butter?

Chocolate chip peanut butter.