At Least It's Clean Laundry

Near-ish enough to bedtime for little girls to start feeling sleepy, Sydney apparently came across her beloved I Spy quilt, all fresh and warm and fluffy, in the bin of clean laundry ready to be sorted:

In the effort of True Mom Confessions, I must tell you that all I did was drag the bin into her bedroom and turn out the light, and then I carried on with my evening plan of red wine, chocolate ice cream, and the final season of The Tudors on DVD.

...and Bubbles

While Willow had her wool felt bug kit, Sydney had her own kit, at which she worked diligently--

--in order to make--

--bubble wands!

 
 
 
 
Bubbles on a summer afternoon--I'm not sure what a better day would look like.

P.S. Don't forget about the Artterro craft kit giveaway that I've got going on over at Crafting a Green World. Missing out on it is NOT an option, my friends.

Bugs...

Because I can't thoughtfully review a gorgeous-looking eco-friendly children's craft kit until my children have had the chance to see if they can wreck it, throw a fit over it, or use it to shoot their eyes out, I do occasionally get sent the odd freebie, such as this Artterro wool felt bug kit that I threw at Willow to see what she'd do with it.

Here's what she did, as a matter of fact:

Played with the wool felt shapes:

Hot glued some stuff together:

 
Did a little sewing:

Admired her work:

And did a little more sewing:

And yes, her fingernails are filthy. Finally had to trim them practically down to the nail bed to get them clean:

 
Cute as a bug?

 
Definitely nothing cuter than that bug-making baby!

You must now click yourself over to Crafting a Green World and enter the Artterro craft kit giveaway that I'm hosting. You can't win if you don't play!

Rainbow W.I.P.

Bazaar Bizarre Cleveland is in less than two weeks! I need the whole family's help to get ready in time, even, apparently, the help of those who might not seem traditionally helpful:

Walking too close to the iron and ensuring that I have to inform people that my products do NOT come from a cat-free home are important jobs, too, you know.

And thus stands my stack of cut fabric, ready to sew into rainbow sets of bean bags:

Add to this the additional cat duties of knocking over my fabric stacks if I leave them out, batting bobbins underneath shelves if I accidentally drop them, and scattering the dried beans if I leave the box open and unattended. They keep me tidy, those cats.

A Girl, Her Cat, a Book, and a Suspicious Amount of Rope

Otherwise known as your average, ordinary, typical, everyday Saturday afternoon.

China Unit Study: Tangrams

Will's interest in learning how to say a few words in Mandarin Chinese (and darn it all if I know where THAT interest came from) coincided neatly with a call for participants for our local homeschool group's international fair, so in our house for the past two or so months, China has been where it's at.

Yes, we did learn a few words in Mandarin Chinese (more on that another time!), but we've also spent our morning and afternoon projects learning about silk, kites, terracotta warriors, calligraphy, dragons, Buddhism, paper, rocketry, the abacus, fireworks, how to build The Great Wall, and other wonders of China. One of our most valuable projects, however, and one of the ones that I'll think we'll keep in heavy rotation even now that the International Fair's finished, was the tangrams.

Invented in China thousands of years ago, tangrams are a simple seven-piece picture puzzle, whose infinite combinations and tricky patterns have kept the girls (and me!) occupied for hours this summer. It's a sneaky little math manipulative, especially for Willow, who has gotten into the habit of exclaiming that she "hates" math, which isn't at all true, of course, for she adores all math activities when she doesn't know that they're math, such as the tangrams!

Using a PBS teacher handout on tangrams, I was able to make tangrams from scrapbook paper, at just about any size that I wanted. I also printed extra pages of the tangrams for the girls to color and cut out, and another copy of the tangrams page on an overhead transparency sheet:

The girls LOVE our overhead projector, so that was a hit, as always:

 Although my favorite part is the shadow theater that it inevitably produces:

I know a good deal when I see one, and I am ALWAYS on the hunt for homeschool supplies, so I'm not ashamed to tell you that it was years ago that I bought a complete and unused tangram-a-day calendar from Goodwill. The pages are unbound, the tangrams are magnetic, and it comes with a metal sheet that you put about five pages back from the page that you're working on, so that you can stand the calendar up and work on a vertical surface.

Of course, the tabletop also works well:

Although the girls had loads of fun making up their own tangram pictures--

--this calendar has a full year's worth of daily puzzles to complete. The next day's page has the solution to the previous page's puzzle, set up as the same picture in miniature, but with lines to show where each piece goes. That way, if you get a little stuck--

--you have some help!

Figuring out the puzzle is good for your brain, and pretty emotionally satisfying, too:

Making the tangrams and solving the tangram puzzles both nurture valuable math skills, so I personally suggest purchasing a tangram+puzzles set that has silhouettes on which you can place the tangrams (makes solving the puzzle more doable for a little), and also making your own tangram sets from a variety of materials.

Geometry in action! And the kid says that she doesn't like math...

Other tangram resources that we tried and loved:

• tangram games from the Sagwa the Chinese Cat PBS Kids site
• Ordinary Life Magic's shrink plastic tangrams

Hoping to Find Lauren Spierer

Normally, I just can't tell you enough about Bloomington.

I can tell you what it's like to cycle through the setting of Breaking Away. I can show you the house that they used in that film--it's a few blocks from my house, on the way to the library.

I can tell you how I used to lie on my stomach on the living room floor and watch the video of John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane":

The Tasty Freeze? It's actually called The Chocolate Moose--we also walk there pretty much every week for a moose horn and a couple of blizzards.

I can tell you how it felt to be in a crowd of people standing in a club here, standing right in front of the stage, in fact, singing along to the Old 97s' "Bloomington" just as loudly as they, themselves, were singing it.

I can tell you how it feels to go anywhere, anywhere at all in Bloomington and always, always know somebody there. And even if I don't know somebody personally, I know somebody that they know, and therefore I know all their business anyway.

Unfortunately, I also can tell you what it's like when a professor is murdered one Christmas, and what it's like to have my husband part of the jury that tried his murderer. Bloomington's a small town, you know? Professor Belton lived a block from my old house, in my old neighborhood. He entered the English department as I was leaving it, and many of my grad school friends were his friends. One of my mom friends knew him in a different context--he chatted with her and held her baby in his arms two nights before he was murdered. One of the other people invited to the party the night before his death, this party that was gone over and over and over again during the trial, is the owner of a downtown cafe, who walked in same fashion show that Syd was in.

See? Small town.

Stuff like that messes you up. You want to know that your town is safe, and not that a murderer walked right past the house that you once lived in with your baby daughter. You want to know that the friendly dude selling you organic salad greens at the farmer's market is not going to kill a friend of a friend. You want to know that your husband isn't going to have to be in the jury for a murder trial, and you don't know if he'll come home tonight because he can't leave until a verdict has been reached. Selfish little wants, I know, but you know that you want them, too.

I thought that I would have plenty of years to recover from that scary business, but now I can tell you more. I can tell you what it feels like to know that a pretty, petite, little college student disappeared off the street as she was walking home early one morning, just downtown. I can tell you what it feels like to see the posters all over town begging for information on her disappearance, to try to find a babysitter so that I can volunteer in the search party, to scan ditches and bushes and doorways for anything suspicious as I run my errands. I can tell you how Sydney's day camp is just across the street from Lauren Spierer's downtown apartment, and how navigating all those satellite trucks and police cars and reporters on camera just makes me so sad. I can tell you that I've already had the conversation with Willow, many times these past two weeks, about exactly what she will do to keep herself safe in college. I can even tell you, because this is Bloomington, after all, and I know everybody, that I know one of the "persons of interest" in Lauren Spierer's disappearance. These kids are all IU students--somebody had to teach them freshman comp, you know?

I want to tell you that this isn't my town that this happens in, not Bloomington, but of course that isn't true. Instead, I'll simply tell you this:

This is Lauren Spierer:

This is the link to download Lauren Spierer's flyer, so that you can display and pass it on.

This is a white truck that was seen circling the block near where she may have been at the time of her disappearance:

This is the number you can phone to give any information that you may have, completely anonymously:
1-800-THE-LOST.

This is something terrible that has happened in my town. If you can help us, please do.