She Made Blue Jello

So one of the problems with our original kitchen, that I'm attempting to remedy as I move the necessities back into our remodeled kitchen, was that I really didn't have a good place to put anything. All the cabinets were deep and dark and high overhead, so a shorty like me better have an excellent memory or the gumption to get up on a kitchen stool every blessed single time that I wanted to cook anything.

Want to guess if I have either of those things?

You know what happened next. As I'm clearing out the old cabinets, I am HORRIFIED to discover how much food I have. Five jars of peanut butter, because there were all those months when Sydney wanted a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast and lunch every single day, so I'd buy a new jar of peanut butter every time I shopped, and then one day she wanted oatmeal. Roughly three times as much rice as I really need, stored in three different locations. A box of bread machine mix--HOW long has it been since I've used the bread machine? In the past two years, I've attempted perhaps three times to cook some recipe or other that calls for cardamom. Want to guess how many jars of cardamom I found?

Three.

Anyway, I also have a side project of exposing Willow to logic, following directions, math skills, and, most importantly, common sense, by giving her food to cook completely by herself--refrigerator biscuits, slice and bake cookies, instant oatmeal kind of stuff to start--so when I pulled out that one last box of blue Jello left over from Willow's ocean party, I handed it straight over to the kiddo and asked her, "Do you want to make some Jello?"

Did she!

I always tell Will that it's best to read all the instructions through before she begins, and to gather everything that she'll need, but she never does, and I don't care, because much humor ensues from this. For instance, first Willow had Sydney fetch the cup of cold water, which took FOREVER, but then when Sydney had gotten it Will looked at the instructions again and said, "Wait, we have to have boiling water first," so Syd had to go pour the cold water down the sink.

Then Willow asked me to boil a cup of water, which I did, and when I arrived with boiling water in a measuring cup Willow looked at it, stymied, for several long, thoughtful seconds before saying, "Hmmm, we need a bowl."

A bowl was obtained and the boiling water was poured in, Sydney was dispatched for cold water, which was poured in, and then the girls stirred the boiling water and cold water together for a while until Willow finally asked, "Shouldn't this be blue?"

The directions were consulted, and blue was, indeed, added:

Will asked Sydney to stir, then tried to stop her after about two seconds, but (masterful quick thinker that I am) I insisted that since stirring was Sydney's job, she should be permitted to stir as long as she thought it necessary. Whew!

Finally, the blue jello was sent to the refrigerator, to be visited about two minutes later by Willow, who interrupted her clean-up to go check on it "and see if it's almost ready."

At this point, I'm curious to know exactly what one would have to do to have jello NOT turn out correctly, but I do have to say that oh, my goodness, those girls surely thought that their jello was just about the tastiest food in the whole world.

Sweets made by sweeties. They're not wrong.

Giant Cardboard Constructions

Sometimes you just have to give the babies every cardboard package that's come your way in the past six months, along with the promise of an infinite supply of hot glue:

When I proposed the project to Sydney, she immediately exclaimed that she wanted to build a play castle, big enough for her to sit in. I was imagining what I thought these smaller boxes were more suited to--namely, a model castle, that she could paint and play with her ponies in. I started to say, "Or, you could make a smaller castle," and then managed, through extreme force of will, to snap my meddling mouth shut and make myself available as the mute construction assistant that I was meant to be.

And, by using entire boxes as one wall each, by hinging that one big Playmobil box (it held the beloved unicorn playset from Grandma Beck, which doesn't even have a home because it's out being played with all the time) open so that one side could be a swinging door, by gluing a blue Jello (Willow's birthday ocean) box on top of another box to make the fourth wall tall enough to glue a shoebox (my new-ish running shoes) on top of the lot as a roof, and then by gluing a series of ever-smaller boxes together as a tower, and then gluing that tower on top of the roof for the castle's turret, I'll be damned if Sydney didn't make herself a play castle just exactly big enough for her to sit in.

And that's how I learn something new every single day.

Rainbow Umbrella, Good as New

Did you know that you could mend an umbrella?

Good thing, too--can you imagine the horror of a rainy day walk with two little girls, only one of whom sports a rainbow umbrella?

Playing Chess with My Daughter

Please forgive my constant, indulgent photographs of nothing more ordinary than the regular afternoon chess game between me and my daughter, but one of my favorite things about being a parent

is being a parent of this particular daughter, this dinosaur-loving, horse-loving, tree-climbing, mud-digging daughter

 who reads as much as I do, who cares just as much about clothes as I do (that being not at all), who is being carefully guided by me out of the same social awkwardness that I'm still learning how to guide myself out of

 and who loves to play chess, loves it as much as I might have loved it at that age if I'd had a chessboard and these long, slow, quiet afternoons with someone beloved to play with

Your kids aren't always like you, of course. Most of the time, they're so blazingly themselves that you have to change your worldview just to understand them and parent them well. It's just sometimes, you know, that you see yourselves in them, or see yourself as you once were, and those are the times that, if you had a certain kind of life, you can heal yourself a little more by treating them in the best way that you, yourself, might have wished that you had best been treated when you were a little kid quite a lot like that.

Name/Nickname Birthday Bunting

What do you do when you want to make a name bunting as a birthday present for a kiddo who goes by her nickname?

I mean, you want the bunting to last, so what if one day she doesn't want to use her nickname anymore and only wants to go by her given name?

But what if in the future she doesn't care for her given name, and only likes her nickname?

Well, you can make her a bunting with her given name on one side--

And on the other side, her nickname:

That way, depending on the kiddo's mood, she can turn the bunting around--

or around--

--or around:

Oh, dear:

If the kid's nickname doesn't center perfectly on the back side, you can add a star, or a heart, or some other little icon. And then you apparently have to go make some for your own kiddos!

Garage Sale Find of the Week

Paper Doll Coloring Set:

For a quarter!

Our Giant Multi-Colored Play Silk Canopy

I of course didn't want to mess up the hand-dyed, multi-colored play silk canopy that I was preparing to list in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, so I let the girls' own copy, as identical as two handmade pieces can be, stand in for the official version:

And yep, that's pretty much a typical day for the play silks!