Ending the Season on a High

Ice skating season is over in our little town, alas. I dreaded its passing this year, because the girls and I enjoy it SO much. It was also the first year that the three of us really took advantage of the nearly abandoned weekday afternoon skating hours, sometimes just the three of us, sometimes with a huge passel of friends, and so we'll all have that to miss.

But before the rink closed, we had one more date at the rink with all our friends:

The kids reached the tween-ish milestone of getting chastised over the intercom by the staff, although they were unable to appreciate such a distinction since the intercom only sounds like "Mwa-wa-wa-WA!" on the ice. It meant, however, "Stop darting around in all directions like maniacs before you kill each other!", and so order was somewhat restored. Although for a while there was an IU hockey player skating around before his practice began, and I swear that he was using our children as obstacles to slalom around at the last millisecond while skating a million miles an hour.

At least that was AFTER the children had stopped darting around the ice in all directions like maniacs.

The majority of the week, however, was spent in daily rehearsals for the Spring Ice Show. The kids were champs about all the work involved in being in the show, and were pretty great, if I do say so myself, in their performance, set to a confusing mash-up of the Hawaii Five-Oh theme song and a Hawaiian hula number. The children themselves, although garbed in grass skirts and with flowers pinned to their hair, did their usual Alpha-level skills of crossovers, glides, snowplow stops, and touching their toes while skating, while also skating in lines, circles, and figure eights, and at one point doing, inexplicably, the macarena. In my video of the performance, you can hear me laughing during that part--oops!

In other words, it was marvelous.

And thus the season ended, as all sporting seasons should, with medals--


--and milkshakes.

This is Why I Can't Get Anything Done

I've been doing a LOT of sewing lately...skirts, our fashion show dress, another dress, bloomers, two sets of fabric matching games, and after I finish the matching games I'm going to start on a couple of T-shirt baby bibs.

My sewing would go a lot more efficiently, however, if it wasn't for a certain cat named Spots:

This most gregarious cat will begin the morning by making the rounds of the neighborhood, catching one neighbor before he leaves for work in the morning and actually going into another neighbor's house, she confessed to Matt the other day. Who knows where else she goes and whom else she visits?

When her morning work is done, she climbs onto our porch railing, reaches out and puts her front paws on the living room windowsill, and stands there looking at us until someone goes to let her in. It never takes long, because a cat's stare through a window is quite disconcerting. Then she'll come find me, wherever I'm working--at the computer, with the girls, at the sewing table--and plop down for a nap in exactly the spot that makes carrying on with my work the most inconvenient. If there's no likely spot, she'll climb onto my shoulders, switch from shoulder to shoulder in front of my face, and basically refuse to stop until I hold her in my arms like a baby.

And then she purrs, of course.

Ballet at Six

Charlie Brown Circle Skirt

When I'm out thrifting, I collect kids' bedding in novelty patterns. They're actually not terribly common, especially the vintage patterns that I like (can't you just envision all the yuck that can happen to a kid's bed sheet?), but in the time that I've been sewing, some great sheets have come and gone through my sewing stash--Incredible Hulk, Powerpuff Girls, dinosaurs of all sorts, Batman and Robin, Spider-man, Scooby Doo, and who knows what else that I'm not remembering?

I've had a great Peanuts flat sheet in my stash for years, loving it but not sure what to do with it. Eventually my girls, however, who have by this point read every comic strip the library has for Foxtrot, Calvin and Hobbes, and Garfield, discovered (with a little sneaky Momma influence) Peanuts. They LOVE Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and Lucy and Peppermint Patty and Linus! So the day after I completely finished up Rose Dress, I cut out and started sewing the girls matching circle skirts from this Peanuts sheet. You'd think that I'd want a break from sewing after all that fuss, but I've already got another sewing project lined up immediately after this one, as well, so I suppose not.

Sydney's skirt still needs the elastic added to the waist, but Will's was finished up in time to write a circle skirt tutorial for Crafting a Green World, so instead of waiting for a mitchy-matchy photo shoot, I went ahead and just photographed her:

In trying to get the most use out of the sheet, I'm afraid that I made Willow's skirt a size too large. I'm embarrassed to tell you that I meant for this skirt to be knee-length!

It's not knee-length, and the elastic waist is a little roomy, as well:

I really, really like this sheet, though, and I actually really like the size of this skirt because it shows off all the little scenes on the sheet so well:

Willow likes the skirt, too, but after a muddy afternoon at the park she did tell me that the skirt "didn't feel like play clothes."

Ah, well. I'll put it back in her wardrobe one more time, but if it still feels a little awkward to her, then I guess that's why I keep a Next Size Up bin!

Rose Dress: Our 2013 Trashion/Refashion Show Entry

I took the bones of Sydney's design, made lots of false starts and took lots of wrong paths, then finally just sat down with an old red silk sheet (complete with Sharpie stains) and spent two solid days at the sewing machine creating Rose Dress:

I've already written about the construction of the dress, so now I just get to show it off, from top--

to bottom:

front--

back--

--and sides:

Thank goodness I had just enough fabric left for those bloomers!

Unlike last year's garment, which wasn't exactly play clothes, I wanted this dress to be something that Sydney could wear whether or not we're accepted into the fashion show, and all spring and summer after the fashion show is over. To that end, I tried to make the dress comfy and soft, light and sturdy, with as few seams and fussy bits as possible:

I'll just put snaps on these shoulder straps when the "fashion" work is over, and the dress will be ready for play!

Fortunately, we already discovered that the dress plays pretty well just as it is:

Muddy

Finally, interspersed with the last of the snow, we have MUD!!!

glorious, sticky, freezing-cold mud

just right after a winter so long that little girls may have forgotten how great mud feels 

Well, with two pairs of shoes, two pairs of pants, and one heavy coat soaking in the wash as I write, I can definitively tell you that they remember now!

shared with Friday's Nature Table

How to Write a Googol

Every homeschool family that we're acquainted with in our hometown, this place with a fabulous public library and a fabulous university library, has WAY too many library materials checked out. This is known.

And every homeschool family, every now and then, has its own way of dealing with all the checked-out library items that just sometimes get a little (lot) too plentiful. My friend Jenny sometimes declares a moratorium on any new check-outs until everything that they already have out gets returned. When we go on vacation as a family, we'll sometimes return every last thing that we have checked out, and then start fresh when we get back home.

Our library materials are once again overflowing their shelves in our living room, so instead of our usual schedule this week, we had a "library" week. Instead of regular school, the girls did their math every day and then each chose a couple of library materials to explore. Usually the material would lend itself to some sort of casual, spontaneously-thought-up enrichment activity, and when it was done the girls would decide if they wanted to keep the item or were ready to return it. It was a lot of fun, we got some great schoolwork completed, and we cleared the shelves a bit--yay!

So we read Can You Count to a Googol? all together, and then, with major build-up, I said to the girls, "Alright now, each of you is going to, all by yourself, write. A. GOOGOL!!!"

Willow promptly pitched a fit.

It was pretty hilarious, actually, poor kid, because you could clearly see her thinking that a googol is a huge number--with 100 zeroes!!!--and therefore must take a really, really, really long time to write! Days, perhaps! Perhaps years!

I'll call it an exercise in trust that she did eventually sit down with me and Sydney. I rolled out some butcher paper (I wish I had the adding machine paper that this kid used), gave the kids pencils, and off they went:

 And how long DOES it take to write a googol, you ask? It took a little longer for Syd, who kept losing track of how many zeroes she'd written, until I suggested that she make a mark under every ten zeroes and then skip count to find her place, but for Willow, who never lost count, it took less than a minute to write her googol:

And yes, she was very, very proud of herself afterwards.

I see a lot more "library weeks" in our future. It was nice to get away from the weekly schedule without having to declare a holiday, nice to take a break from our regular studies to explore some new subjects, nice to just read and think up projects and then do them all week. We're back to our regular studies of Latin, skip counting, U.S. geography, grammar, human biology, Ancient Egyptian history, etc., next week, but whenever that all starts to feel stale again, I won't hesitate to declare another school week that's guided by our fantastic library materials.