My Latest Over at Crafting a Green World: Baby Gifts and the St. Louis City Museum

This week I wrote a round-up of handmade upcycled baby gifts and a review of the St. Louis City Museum, basically my favorite place ever. 

I purposely scheduled a day in St. Louis as part of our road trip to visit my parents in Arkansas, solely so that we could spend this time at the City Museum. We haven't been in years (it's spendy, and we don't always have the room in our budget for spendy), and it was fascinating for me to see how our experiences of the museum have evolved since we last visited trailing a preschooler and a toddler.

For me, it evolved into a lot more of this:

My Will has evolved from a confident climber with whom I could keep up into a confident climber with whom NO other mortal could keep up. Matt and I were separated right after we arrived when we discovered that Sydney, who had been instructed to put on sensible shoes, had instead chosen her second-hand Crocs, and he marched her back out to the car to change (I recognize that I am wildly permissive in many ways, but about sensible footwear I will NOT compromise, and I was appalled at the number of children being permitted to play strenuously here hindered by flip-flops and loose-fitting Crocs). This meant that when they returned, not knowing where Willow and I were, they basically climbed around together--

Can you see them in the distance? Matt's in the orange shirt

 --and I was left to not so much climb around with Willow, but rather to climb to find myself advantageous look-out points to keep her in sight. Sometimes my advantageous look-out was at this distance--

Look at that smile!

 But the vast majority of the time it was at this distance--

or this distance--

--or this, not so much distance--

--but certainly not accessible, either! This crawl-way is set UNDERNEATH a catwalk that's about three stories up. Well, children can crawl through it, but adults are required to either face-down army crawl or face-up pull themselves along with their arms. I am NOT a fan of enclosed spaces (I can trace this phobia back to one extremely inappropriate made-up story told to me by my mother so long ago that it's one of my earliest memories--if you ask nicely, I can give you a long itemized list of inappropriate things that my mother has said to me, rated in order of trauma-causing potential, and this is only the third) and, since I've gained a lot of weight in the last few years so that I've become less confident about knowing the physical space that my body takes up, I chickened out and took this path of videography instead:

I did, however, haul myself up this incline many, many, many times:

It was a fabulous quad workout, judging from the pain in my quads for the next three days. I LOVE a good quad work-out, don't you?

Other amenities of just the outdoor playground at the City Museum include the giant ball pit--

--in which, having long forgotten about each other while running their separate routes through the playground, two sisters re-discovered each other. Alas, they were on separate sides of an iron structure!--

--and lots of slides, including this free-fall slide:


Inside, the climate may be more amenable--

--but the play is equally challenging:

I fought some demons in this giant artificial caving system, which is dark, so that you can't see where you're going well, and has lots of tiny tunnels and slides that disappear into the darkness, so that you (or at least I!) don't know if the tiny tunnel slide that you would barely fit in will lead somewhere that will also fit you, or somewhere that you can get out of again.

Of course, now that I'm home and can pump up the exposure and contrast on my photos until they're legible, I can see that at least these parts of the caving system are MUCH roomier than I'd imagined in the darkness:

Silly me! My vow is to be MUCH more adventurous in our next visit. After all, I didn't come across any corpses of fat people wedged anywhere in any part of the museum, so it's not as if I can't be rescued even if I DID get stuck, right?

...um, right?

At Turtle Park

Turtle Park in St. Louis is one of our favorite spots in the world, created by one of our favorite artists (the late Bob Cassilly, artist/creator of another of our favorite spots in the world). On our road trip last week, we spent an overcast afternoon there, climbing around and taking goofy pictures of each other:

While we were here goofing around, I was struck by the revelation that my children are now handy enough with my large and unwieldy camera to actually use it to take non-blurry photographs of me and their father:

Look at that! A photo of the two of us, in the same frame and everything! So THAT'S why people have kids!

In Which I Rave about Instagram

I'm WAAAAY behind the times, I know. I should have been raving about Instagram 18 months ago, right?

Instead, I've only been raving about Instagram since April. April was when Instagram first became available for Android phones. And now I rave about Instagram.

The accessibility of artistic tools is really important. One of my academic interests is outsider art, ranging from the medieval period's affective piety to contemporary fanfic, and I am all for putting the best tools into the hands of every single person everywhere, and then letting them do whatever the hell they want with it. That's why I also love good camera phones--you tend to create with what you have, and you always have your phone with you. And to combine a good camera phone with professional-quality photo effects? It really has reinvented the art of photography.

dissecting flowers

Even with a wonderful camera that hangs around my neck most of the day, I still take tons of Instagram photos of our daily lives:

kid looking at flower parts through our Brock Magiscope

biking home from the library after a tea party in the Children's Dept.

painting on the front porch

 

I also had a LOT of fun editing on the fly photos from our road trip last week:

St. Louis City Museum

driving and driving and DRIVING!!!

crossing the Arkansas River at sunset

kid taking a photo outside Laura Ingalls Wilder's house

And now that I'm home and my external hard drive is on the fritz (oh gods of computer hardware, if you just fix my external hard drive this time, I swear I'll invest in a back-up storage device right away!), I used some of those same Instagram photos of the City Museum, the ones that I took with my phone after my camera battery died, in tomorrow's CAGW post about the City Museum. 

I can guarantee that I wouldn't have posted grainy old old-school camera phone pics on any of my nice, beautiful blogs!

Hershey Bar Multiplication

It's gimmicky and product-focused, yes, but this Hershey's Milk Chocolate Multiplication Book that we checked out of the library was a VERY fun way to introduce the girls to multiplication arrays!

The book mostly shows rectangles of Hershey chocolates set up in arrays--Matt had the girls do the same along with the book, then threw in some new ones for them:

They also did multiplication with grouping:

As you can see, they more or less got the idea!

Of course, we'll be doing the arrays and grouping with tons of other less edible stuff, too--pattern blocks, Cuisenaire rods, coins, counters, stones, and whatever else we find--but the kiddos were just as thrilled as I'd thought they'd be to play around with candy. I was also thrilled to note that they really didn't eat very much of it--certainly not an entire Hershey bar each, and I think that there were a total of three Hershey bars in play during the project. So much of the joy of candy is simply the access to it--PLAYING with CANDY!!!--and also the pleasure of touching it, smelling it, looking at it, and manipulating it into different patterns. Tasting the candy is pretty great, as well, but when you're getting so much stimulation from all those other aspects, then I think that it takes a great deal away from the need to just shove it in your mouth and keep shoving it in.

My Latest Over at Crafting a Green World: Wood Painting and Soap Carving

a round-up of non-toxic methods to paint and seal wooden toys

and a tutorial on setting up a soap carving activity for your kiddos

A TARDIS on a T-Shirt

Along with my lovely TARDIS laptop sleeve, I also now have a freezer paper stenciled TARDIS T-shirt, once again putting something geeky onto one of the very few plain items of clothing that I own (even the pants are affected--I have a pair of jeans with a TIE Fighter on them, a pair of cargo pants with a volcano on them, and a pair of shorts with a starry constellation on them):

I asked Matt to take some photos of me wearing my new shirt, but then I immediately got busy forming no-rise baguettes out of very sticky bread dough--

--so I'm afraid that this is all the modeling you get!

I have two more fangeeky projects ready to be done this week:

1. freezer paper stenciling a TARDIS onto a baby gown in preparation for a baby shower next weekend, and 
2. writing the entire Gozer the Traveler monologue onto the back of my thrifted Ghostbusters T-shirt.

And, of course, there's homeschooling and making dinner and doing my writing gigs and prepping for a road trip, etc., but all that pales compared to geeky fan art!

Chess Bag

We do not have a complete set of chess pieces; instead, we have what seems like a dozen incomplete sets of chess pieces. When we play, we organize them like "I've got the darkish pieces, and you've got the light-ish ones," or "I've got the browny ones, and you've got the reds," or "I've got the big ones, and you've got the tiny ones."

Will used to keep all her pieces in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, until I finally got embarrassed enough about watching her cart a dirty plastic bag of mis-matched chess pieces to chess club and tournaments, surrounded by those kids with the competition-style chess sets and the private chess tutors, to sew her up a bag for holding chess pieces that is worthy of my own little chess-playing kid.

The pattern for the bag is as simple as it could get--it's just my drawstring bag tutorial, sized up to match that big old Ziploc bag that I was pretty happy to throw in the trash. The real fun came in finding a stencil of chess pieces online, cutting it out of contact paper and ironing it to the bag, and then having Willow paint it:

We both ended up VERY pleased with our efforts:

And then off it went to chess club!