My Heart is in Boston Tonight

Let's be there together, shall we?

Bibs for Babies

I am not going to have anymore babies on purpose (knock on wood), so it's a source of sadness to me sometimes that I didn't become the hyper-engaged crafter that I am today until after my second baby was born.

Think of all the blankies that I missed out on sewing for my own babes. The baby gowns! The rompers! The Boppy covers! The cloth stacking rings! The little hats! The diaper covers! The mei tais! All the weensy little things, sewn by me, just for my baby, and I get to put them on her, and look at her all super-cute, and take her picture, because in this fantasy I'm also not half-functioning under a fog of exhaustion.

Suffice to say...

I sort of have a thing for sewing presents for other people's babies. 

A few weeks ago, there was a perfect storm of babies being born. My half-sister had a baby, and a friend here in town had a baby, and a co-worker a couple of states over had a baby.

I got to sew little baby presents in batches! 

It totally beat to hell the sympathy cards that I had to write in batches a couple of months ago.

And what's great for batch sewing for babies?

Bibs, that's what!

I used my old pattern for these T-shirt bibs that I made, gasp!, almost five years ago, to make bibs for all the new babies. I really, really liked the look of the T-shirt bibs, especially the tie-dyed ones, but I'm trying to sew from my stash this year (have I mentioned that the girls and I are undertaking another epic road trip in a couple of months? Hershey World, here we come!), and I have lots of lovely quilting cottons in my stash.

So I ironed interfacing to both pieces of fabric, sewed them and turned them and edge-stitched them--

--stopped to admire them in a can't-stop-beaming-at-them way that totally disturbed poor Matt when he happened to walk by and catch me at it--

--snap set them, monogrammed them, forgot to take pictures of them, and gave them to babies. Two sets were mailed, and one set was given in person, along with that fabric matching game big siblings present that caused me so much grief.

As I was chatting with my friends that day, including the new mom, we were talking about my "baby presents in batches" thing, and I confessed that I actually had yet another long-distance friend who had just had another baby, but they weren't getting another baby present, because they hadn't acknowledged the last one.

"Oh, you're one of THOSE people," the new mom said, probably half-operating under her own fog of exhaustion and contemplating a future of having to snap a bib around the neck of the baby currently at her breast and show it to me as yet another chore to complete before she could catch her entire hour in a row of sleep that night.

I said, "OH yeah, I'm one of those people! The only reason on this Earth why someone would make someone else's baby a gift by hand is that they want to see the damn baby WITH their gift. The whole time they're knitting a little baby hat or sewing a blankie or whatever, they're thinking, 'That little baby is going to look so cute in this hat/blankie/onesie whatever! I can't wait to see it!' So yeah, if the person that you made a baby gift for receives the gift, throws it in the baby's dresser, and gets on with their life, gift unacknowledged, it kind of kills the point of making them another baby gift. Their new kid needs some bibs? They can go to Wal-mart--they don't have to personally thank the sweat shop workers there."

And that's how I probably took the flavor out of one new mom's zest for receiving gifts for all her current and future children. Just please remember that I never have claimed to be one of those good person-type thingies. 

I just like making stuff for babies.

Memory Work is WORK!

Memory work is useful, yes, but easy it is absolutely NOT! As I've added more memory work to our weekly schedule, I've found that it's really necessary to keep finding different ways to review the same material every day. Too many flashcards, and too much straight copywork, and the kiddos' brains just tune out. They'll be able to quickly give the correct response in that same format, but ask them the same question in a different way, and they suddenly can't remember a single Latin word that they've been reviewing daily for a month, sigh.

Therefore, mostly for my own reference, but for yours, too, if you care about such things, I've compiled below my list of all the varied ways that I can think of to review memory work, everything from spelling words to math facts, timeline dates to state capitals, poetry to sight words, vocabulary to Latin translations...you get the idea:

Copy in alphabetical order. This works for spelling/vocabulary words and the kids' Latin words--it's regular old copywork, but you have to use your brain a bit more, and it makes sure that you're not studying the words in the same order every time.

Write it on the window with dry erase markers or the sidewalk with chalk. The kiddos ALWAYS like to do this, but it does take a ton of time, since if you've given them dry erase markers or chalk and fun things to draw on, you've obviously got to let them draw:

Speed race! This would give Sydney a heart attack, but it's been working really well with Willow and multiplication. Simply memorizing her multiplication table is a fail, because she can calculate so quickly that she can work any fact out in her head in a few seconds, and then you're left wondering, "Is she trying to remember, or counting by eights in her head?". I've been using these multiplication matching puzzles, however, timing Willow as she races to complete them, and encouraging her to beat the previous day's time. If it looks like she's starting to memorize the positions of the answers as well as the answers, I skip to different tables for a few days, and then go back to the earlier ones for a fresh look and a review.

Songs. Will is our star at memorizing facts through song (her recitation of all the countries of Africa still gives me pridey feelings inside), but Syd is quickly catching her up, with her love of the Song School Latin CD. It takes a lot of curating, though, because many educational songs are crap. I use my free Spotify app to search for and then stream songs for just about every subject--they're not all for memorizing, of course (the girls always want to listen to the state song of whatever state they're studying, for instance), but you'd be surprised how happily you can bop along to the multiplication table when it's sung by a good voice to a catchy tune. Our favorite, by FAR, is Victor Johnson's Multiplication and Skip Counting Songs, although there's also a super annoying song ("The Pi Song," by Bryant Oden) that I'm using to memorize pi:

"They said 'Would you like some pi?' I said, 'Yes, I would!' I forgot they majored in math. I would undo it if I could! They said, '3.1415926535897932384626433.'" Yep, that's from memory! Don't all congratulate me at once.

DIY Dry Erase. The girls actually DON'T like this too much, because it takes a lot more elbow grease to erase than a conventional dry erase board, but for things like parts labeling or their spelling words, I like to laminate the document to use as a dry erase:

I've also heard that page protectors and CD cases work well as dry erase boards, but I haven't tried them yet. One more thing for my to-do list!

Tape yourself. The girls love doing this for poetry and spelling words. Not only does the taping require a lot of thoughtful interaction with their memory work, but it also really encourages repetition--I think they just like to listen to themselves! I let them record these on my ipod, which they're allowed to use, too--

--but if a certain little someone receives an ipod touch for her birthday (assuming that Craigslist/local pawn shops cooperate), then they can start recording on that, instead. 

DIY flash cards. They like their flash cards better if they help me make them. This works especially well for Latin, since we use these coloring pages that correspond to all the vocabulary in Song School Latin. I print them four to a page, the girls color them, then (sloppily) cut them out and (even more sloppily) laminate them, all by themselves. Big fun, and impossible for them to say that they hate later on.

So that's what I've got so far. I need WAY more ideas, though! I'd like to have twenty or so possibilities, to support a full month of memory work without repetition. But I also need ideas that don't require a ton of prep work--I do NOT want to be creating a Montessori-style three-part card for every subject every week, for instance--or use a ton of expensive or disposable materials. 

Help?

Finally, the Sun!

And it's about time! In the 13 years that I've lived in Indiana, this is the latest spring that I've ever experienced.

Clearly, then, in the 13 years that I've lived in Indiana, this is the spring that I've been cherishing the most. On the first really nice day of spring, just a handful of days ago, we meandered over to the park, as we often do, sleepwalking almost in our routine (as we perhaps often do), and it wasn't until we were there, under an actual SUN and an actual BLUE SKY, that we all three sort of stopped, came to ourselves, and started exclaiming "It's a really nice day today!"

You'd think that these children had never seen chalk before, as the job of making a sidewalk chalk fashion show runway quickly turned to making everything else in their imaginations:

It's so early in the season that I don't even have sidewalk chalk yet!

After that, there was a lot more running around like maniacs--

--plenty of rubbernecking of a random family (mom, dad, four-ish small kids) who were playing the most aggressive game of soccer that I have ever seen adults and children play together (Calling a four-year-old a cheater because he touched the ball with his hand? Nice job, Dad!), and, yes, plenty of just plain basking:

Now that it's actually sunny out, I've got to stop putting them facing the sun in order to take their pictures, poor kid!

2013 Science Fair

While one girl and her Momma have been invested in the fashion show of late, the other girl and her Dadda have been just as busy.

I was sad to see that this year's homeschool Science Fair overlapped with one of our Trashion/Refashion Show rehearsals, but such is life--one must choose one's commitments, and then commit to one's choices. However, having only one kid in the Science Fair this year made this year's Science Fair a fine project for just that kid and her Dadda to do together. I left it all to them--I incorporated some time for Willow to work on her project during our school days, and I helped her write a reference guide, and she dictated her report to me, and I helped her rehearse her presentation, but she and Matt did all the hands-on dirty work, which included making several paper airplanes, flying each of them 20 times and measuring each flight, averaging and line graphing all the flights, and making some pretty kick-ass graphics to represent the data. It's good to have a graphic designer for a father!

Here's Will rehearsing her presentation, the day of the Science Fair:


She was really proud of her project (as she should be!), and pretty excited to share it--

--and, okay, maybe a little nervous, too--

--at least until she's distracted by Matt:

We call this the Willow Death Glare. We are often its victims.

 I wish I could show you Willow's actual presentation, which she did an amazing job at, so comfortable and confident and focused in front of all those eyes, but there are a bunch of other kids in it. It's super-cute watching her coach all the kids through the making of the Dynamic Dart--I wasn't sure how this part would go, since I know from experience that students will get everything wrong that it's possible to get wrong when following instruction, with seemingly every student doing something uniquely incorrect all at the same time. And yep, that's how it went here, but Willow went around and helped kids who got stuck, and a couple of parents helped out, and in the end, everyone had their very own Dynamic Dart.

Fortunately, the other side of the conference room was free--a perfect place, really, for the flying of paper airplanes:

Across town, Syd and I finished our rehearsal, ran to the car, sped over to the library, screeched into a parking spot, and galloped inside, just missing the last presentation, but just in time for the socialization. Homeschoolers are a diverse bunch, and although we see friends from this group a few times a week, there are other friends that we only see at these types of events, so there's a lot of playing to get done in a short amount of time.

And, of course, a lot of smiles to let out:

What can I say? Science makes us happy!

Barbie Fashion Show

We are deep into fashion show season here! Syd is practicing her runway walk daily, and spending much of the rest of her days thinking, dreaming about, talking about, and playing fashion show.

On our free day from school last week, I was spending the afternoon completing some orders from my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, and trying really hard to ignore all screams, thumps, and crashes from the other room, but I could not ignore my kiddo when she came in to theatrically announce that it was time for the Barbie fashion show in the next room.

A Barbie fashion show?!? Count me IN!

So I turned off the heat gun, laid a cloth over the beeswax (I've learned through experience that a cat will lie on top of rolled beeswax, and that rolled beeswax that a cat has lain on top of will never again be suitable for sale), and followed Syd out to the living room, where my clever girl had spent HER afternoon creating garments for each of her hand-me-down Barbies, and using our colored masking tape to tape a fashion show runway onto the floor.

Syd asked me to find "thumpy music" for the show, so I turned on the Club/House radio station on Spotify, and off we went!


Before I go on, I just have to ask you: you're not sitting there snarking on my house, are you? It's fine if you are, because I am not the person who stages my shots, or even runs around cleaning like crazy when someone's about to come over. Okay, I WILL clean the bathroom sink and put out a fresh hand towel, but I probably won't vacuum or clear off the table. So yes, the room that you can see through the doorway is messy, and the games don't fit on those built-in shelves, and the hallway has a kid-painted rainbow right in the middle of it, and I didn't vacuum the carpet, and I never learned that trick of how to hide a cord so that it doesn't hang in the middle of everything, and man, do our hardwood floors look run-down!

Anyway, back to the story: I love Sydney's Barbie fashion show, because you can really see how much of the process she's learned from her years of experience as a Trashion/Refashion Show designer/model. She taped her models' marks, and she walks them and poses them and walks them again, and they take care to show the entire outfit to both sides of the audience, and they certainly look like they're having fun, don't they?

But of course, the most important aspect of the model's performance is the garment, and I really, REALLY love how Sydney created each model's outfit, some from our stash of vintage Barbie clothes, but most assembled from my scrap fabric bin:

And speaking of Ken, Sydney has a further video starring him. She produced, directed, and served as costume designer. I filmed exactly as she dictated:


Hopefully we won't have anything like THAT at the fashion show!

Easter 2013

the haul

the hunt

and afterwards, the happy girls full of chocolate, playing Professor Noggin with their parents

the perfect holiday, yes?