Ancient Egypt Unit Study: Sugar Cube Pyramids

Shopping for sugar cubes involved a trade-off, unfortunately. I sacrificed the perfectly uniform shapes that more realistically depict the engineering of the Ancient Egyptians for these brown sugar cubes that more realistically depict the color of the sand blocks that they used:

Unfortunately, these brown sugar cubes don't have good regular edges, and since we were "between" kitchens during this project (we've since finally kicked the workers out of the mostly finished kitchen, choosing to suffice with plywood nailed to the tops of our cabinets and partly unpainted walls until we can do the work ourselves rather than just flat-out run out of money, which is what we were heading towards, sigh) I couldn't mix up a batch of royal icing to use as mortar. I therefore don't think, then, that this particular project achieved a good model of the engineering of an Ancient Egyptian pyramid.

Ask me if the kids care:

The girls had a fabulous time building with their little sugar cube building blocks, and were quite proud of their ungainly, tumble-down sugar cube constructions:

Of course, what kind of momma would I be if I didn't create along with them?

I hid these sugar cubes away until a day in the near future when I feel like mixing up royal icing and trying the pyramids again, and they'll also be perfect with our Halloween candy houses and Christmas gingerbread houses. I'm still on the lookout for uniform brown sugar cubes, but at least where we live, packages of sugar cubes in grocery stores seem to have mostly gone the way of the dinosaur.

Or should I say the Ancient Egyptian pyramid?

There is Nothing Like a New Box of Crayons

I bought these Stockmar beeswax crayons, then said the magic words:

"Hey, girls! I have a brand-new box of crayons for you!"

I've been experimenting with setting out more than one art supply at a time when the girls are creating, and nothing goes together better than watercolors and crayons:

Eventually these crayons will make their way towards leaf rubbings and headstone rubbings, etc., but it's good to know that they also make a pretty handy rainbow.

We used:

Handmade Dresses For Two Little Girls Who Live in Haiti

We don't know these two little girls, but thanks to the Homemade Dress Drive for Haiti, we do know the exact orphanage in Port Au Prince, Haiti, where they live.

We know exactly the perfect sundress to make for them.

We know exactly the perfect thrifted sheet from my fabric stash to use:

It should be cool and comfy in such a warm climate. Even though the sheeting is mostly white, it didn't seem thin enough to need a lining. I'd likely have added one, anyway, and made the dresses reversible, if I'd been the one sewing them, but I was not.

Each little girl sewed her own sundress for a little Haitian girl, and we know that the little girl who receives that dress will be just size of my own little seamstress, because each little girl sewed her dress in exactly her own dress size.

I printed out the sundress pattern in a 5 and a 7, assembled them, and handed them off to the girls, who were in charge of making sure that I cut out each of their pattern pieces the right way and in the right number. Will took pictures, presumably as evidence that I was going about the whole thing properly:

You can, of course, sew the yoke and straps in a complementary fabric, and perhaps use bias tape to hem the dress instead of a simple folded hem, but we just kept things simple:

This is, after all, each girl's largest and most complicated sewing project ever, to date. Can't you tell?

I did have the girls do french seams for the sides, however. French seams are just about as simple a way to finish a seam as you can find, and extremely sturdy.

I laid the pieces out, ironed and pinned them, then called each girl in when it was time to sew her piece--

--then ironed it, laid out the next piece and ironed and pinned it for the next girl when she was done. The girls went back and forth from their play to sewing and back to play, and I was delighted (and not a bit surprised) to see that every single time I called to them, for every single piece that they had to sew, they always ran to me immediately, screaming "YAAAAAYYYYY!!!!!".

I often feel that way about sewing, myself.

I sewed the straps myself, and I basted the bottom hem, but the entire rest of the dress--yoke in the front and yoke in the back, each sewn at the top and the bottom; two side hems with wrong sides together, then again with right sides together to make the french seam; and the bottom hem--each girl sewed entirely by herself:

It was a big undertaking, and a big accomplishment for two little girls:

I hope that the two little girls in Port Au Prince who receive these dresses will find them useful, and pretty, and that they'll be just the exact sizes of my own little girls, who got such pleasure out of sewing for them.

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.