My Latest: Poop and Libraries (and the Antique Furniture Hiding in My Outbuildings)

for Insteading, a discussion of humanure composting and wastewater gardening

and for Crafting a Green World, an article about a little kid forced to shut down his Little Free Library

Here on the home front, there's not as much unpacking going on as you'd think--can't really put things away when there's nothing to put stuff ON, or IN, you know--but I've got a dresser half-painted in the garage and my lockers half-painted on the driveway, and the card catalogue also out there waiting its turn, and tomorrow evening, perhaps, before we walk across our yard to go watch the new Transformers movie at the drive-in (I'm torn about letting the kids watch this one--on the one hand, I think it'll will be too scary and too long for them, but on the other hand, I didn't let them watch X-Men with us last weekend, and you can't let kids live next door to a drive-in and not let them go to ANY of the movies!!!), I'm going to take Matt on a tour of the old garage and the even older general store, and point out to him all of the antique, unfinished wooden storage units that I want him to move inside for me. 

Namely these--

behind the egregious photo of my stove--toy shelves for the living room and children's bedroom?

MASSIVE dresser with tons of these little drawers that just sit on the shelves--wants to live in my bedroom and hold my pretty things?

feed bin? Super gross right now, but could hold a hell of a lot of fabric all nicely folded and out of sight

display shelves from the general store--maybe these would be better toy/treasure shelves, given the kids' insistence on displaying ALL THE THINGS

And I haven't even been into the attic yet! It requires bringing a ladder in from the garage, which I'm not up for, but the kids and Matt did it once. The kids tell me that there's a fire truck up there, and Matt says that there are Christmas decorations from who knows when. 

I'll check it out when I've got the downstairs sorted...

Indiana Unit Study: Homeschool Field Trip to the Eiteljorg Museum

The Eiteljorg is not one of my favorite museums. Its artifacts are beautiful, but I don't think that it includes nearly enough breadth and depth in its exhibits; what should occupy the entire museum fills merely three galleries, and most of the downstairs children's gallery is contextually unrelated to the rest of the museum. The Western art theme appears tacked onto the American Indians focus, as if the curators couldn't quite figure out how to usefully juxtapose the two major collections that they were given.

To add to that, I've never come even close to getting over my pique from the time that I visited with the kids perhaps three years ago and found the staff as a whole to be shockingly aggressive about the children's behavior. Perhaps they had all just taken a workshop on managing children or something, but in the course of one morning (I was fed up and took the kids to the zoo for the afternoon) we were chastised three entire times for things that we did not do (we were never chastised for anything that we did do, of course--this is pretty braggy, but my kids are excellent museum-goers). As Will drank from a drinking fountain just outside the restroom in the lobby, while I stood just inside the open restroom door to supervise both her and Syd, still in the bathroom, an employee came over and informed me that my children had to stay with me. As soon as Syd placed her hand on a red velvet rope in front of a large painting, an employee came over and told her to stop leaning on the rope. As we were leaving the children's gallery after peeking in and deciding it was too untidily chaotic to enjoy, an employee came over and told the children that they were supposed to put things back after they played with them, and they could not leave until they helped her clean up.

Nevertheless, our Indiana study included a large Native American component, so I considered revisiting the Eiteljorg to be a must-do. Fortunately for the current crop of docents, as I came loaded for bear, this trip was uneventful, and lots of learning was done:

I was fascinated by the many origin stories and pre-contact artifacts, although surprised that I didn't see more on the Mound Builders, our particular area of emphasis in this unit.

We also spent a lot of time with the Plains Indians, since we'll be in their area this month!

The kids enjoyed the hands-on stations--I would have liked to have seen one in every section of the many galleries.

Check out this decorative horse tack!

We now know the difference between a wigwam and a teepee.

We loved the art and artifacts.

Even those she's completed that particular activity for her Girl Scouts Brownie Pottery badge many times over, Syd still enjoys sketching pottery.

Although I think we've exhaustively covered fourth- and second-grade American history this year, I still need to firm up some Native American sites to visit on our upcoming road trip--Syd, in particular, is very interested in the Plains Indians--and I'd still love to find a truly stellar Native American museum to visit one day. 

Perhaps fifth and third grade American history will require another road trip to D.C?

House Report: Being at Home

Chaos!

Good chaos, at least. Happy chaos.

We've been about a week living in our new house--well, on Sunday night we slept on bare mattresses back at our old house after the toilets in our new house backed up into the bathtubs (turns out that houses that are vacant for two years get things like roots growing into their main sewer lines), but plumbers fixed that for us on Monday and we've been here ever since.

Most of our belongings are still in boxes lining the walls, because our new house doesn't have any SHELVES!!!!!, and poor Matt is still spending most of his time at the old house getting it ready to be sold, but the kids and I, at least, are happily puttering about and finding new corners to read in and watching the chickens learning how to free-range and exploring our new property, which is wonderful and beautiful and poorly-maintained and bounteous. Already, as we drove the other day through town to redeem Will's reading program prize of an ice cream voucher from a local ice cream stand, I looked at the houses that we passed in town and thought, "GAH! Their yards are all so SMALL!"

I have a to-do list so long that I've actually imported it into Microsoft Word so that I can organize it according to priority (lots of painting ratty found-on-the-side-of-the-road furniture to make it look less ratty, lots of shelf building, lots of transplanting perennials from old house to new, etc.), and Matt has a totally different to-do list that's even longer, but we are SO happy. And loving our house. And walking across our yard to the drive-in to watch movies. And last night, coming home after 10:00 pm from a swimming date with friends, we stopped at the yard in astonishment, then sat together on the roof of our root cellar and watched hundreds of fireflies sparkling like twinkle lights in the woods behind the field behind our house--all over the woods, from the tops of the trees to the bottoms, incomparable to anything we'd ever seen before.

To conclude, two photos, the only two, other than cell phone shots of chickens cutely wandering where they shouldn't, that I've found time to take this week:

Yes, I've been permitting the kids to ride their scooter indoors.

And yes, Will's found a spot to read. That's all she needs in a home.

Really, though. We definitely need some shelves.

Comic Book Pinbacks for Pumpkin+Bear Etsy

Back when I did craft fairs, I looooooved making pinbacks from comic books. The superheroes and the sound effects all made good buttons, but my favorite task was to find interesting bits of dialogue to punch out, especially if they said something completely different when taken out of context.

It takes a lot of work to photograph and write an etsy listing, so I've balked at listing these comic book pinbacks individually in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop... until now. For a little while, at least. Call it an experiment. Or call it a discovery of tons of comic book pinbacks as I was packing, and a realization that I probably should neither completely blanket my backpack in them nor give them away as Christmas presents for the next five years.

Or call it procrastination, because unpacking SUCKS!

Here's my first listing, Proceed with Caution:

I'll be adding more comic book pinbacks over the next few days, and every time you see a new one appear in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, you'll know that there's some crucial house chore that I REALLY should be doing instead.

Doll Dress Designs

My fabric scrap bin gets a lot of turnover, as this is one of Syd's favorite activities:

This garment is cut from a single piece of quilting cotton, with tape to fasten the back and a ribbon around the waist.

Syd sewed the bodice and skirt of this outfit together on my sewing machine. It's held closed at the back with the belt cut from scrap fabric; the garment also features a matching ascot and half-sleeves held on with tape.

This pipe cleaner doll features a dress made from a single piece of scrap fabric, fastened just below the bust with a ribbon tie. Brown flannel hair is held in place with masking tape.

This simple garment is one piece of vintage scrap fabric with a masking tape belt.

I've been brainstorming how to enrich Syd's interest in fashion design--it's MUCH easier to find resources to teach kids computer programming and pottery making than it is clothing design! Once we're a little more settled in our new house (I'm currently writing this post while sitting on a mattress in the bedroom of our old house, a place that I now refer to as my "bolt hole," while Matt makes phone calls from work to try to find a plumber to repair the main line in our new house. I'm pretty sure the toilets aren't supposed to back up into the bathtubs there...), I'd like to set up my older sewing machine for Syd, as well as teach her a couple of simple clothing patterns in her size that she can use independently. I've also got some more larger white play silks to dye for her, because play silks make really versatile costumes. We should continue our drawing lessons, as well--I want to add Waldorf form drawing into the lesson schedule.

Because this is definitely a kid who could be wearing only her own home-sewn creations by high school. Perhaps she'll sew for me, too!

Girl Scouts at the Horse Races

I'm pretty bad about making Matt take the kids by himself to Girl Scout events that I don't want to attend (that Girl Scout camp-out at Victory Field looked SUPER fun... for the children), and signing us all up for the events that I DO want to attend. So although Matt has taken various numbers of related and unrelated Girl Scouts to tea parties at a retirement home, movies at the university, service projects, camp-outs, geography fairs, sports and music workshops, etc., while I stayed at home and actively did not attend those tea parties and movies and workshops and camp-outs, we all went to the latest Girl Scout field trip to Hoosier Park.

Because I've been to retirement homes and movies and baseball games before, but I have NEVER been to the horse races!

Willow tries on the colors.

You're right by the track!

It was all harness racing this particular evening.

If there's not a craft project, it's probably not a Girl Scout event!

 The biggest perk of attending the races as a Girl Scout (along with the souvenir T-shirt and fun patch for the backs of the kids' vests) was getting to go on a barn tour. We visited a barn where some harness racers who weren't racing that evening were stabled:

Syd asked a trainer what was on this horse's legs, and she explained that sometimes a horse's legs get sore after a race, so they put liniment on them and wrap them, but sometimes they have to cover the wrappings with duct tape if the horses try to chew them.

My only prior experience with racehorses was seeing the thoroughbreds at Kentucky Horse Park, and they are VERY aggressive, so once I saw how accessible all these horses were, I reminded the kids to watch their ears and mind their mouths. Harness racehorses are mares and fillies, however, and most of them were about the sweetest horses we've ever met:

Way to mind her mouth, Syd!

Of course, every barn has its feisty horses. I love Will's face in this next photo--I was clicking the shutter as the horse started to nuzzle her, but caught her reaction just after it decided it would maybe rather eat her hair instead:

See Syd laughing? She was the only one who could see it and she wasn't telling anyone, but that dang horse is STILL eating Will's hair!

The kids and I were really only there to sightsee--

--but of course people bet on these races, and there were some spectators who were VERY invested in each race's outcome:

Matt, now... Matt enjoys gambling. I do NOT think that gambling is fun, because I do not think that we have enough money to fool around with giving it away, but I did point out to him a notice in the brochure that stated that if you donated $5 to the Girl Scouts while you were there, they'd give you that five bucks in casino cash or whatever. If you're going to give your money away by gambling, you might as well give it to the Girl Scouts rather than the casino. Matt hated all the actual casino stuff when he went in there, because it was all automated and therefore didn't work right (and do you even want to guess about how long I had to listen to *that* rant on the way home? Not that long, actually, because I fell asleep pretty much as soon as we hit the highway, but still...), but he also got a couple of vouchers to bet on the horses, AND during the barn tour he heard some kid who was also on the tour going on and on about the racehorse that his family owns, AND that racehorse was actually racing that night, so Matt placed a bet on that kid's horse--

--and she won!

I had been a little concerned about this trip beforehand--I was worried it would be seedy (it was, a little, but nothing that we're not used to) and that the kids would see a horse get shot in the head (no on-track euthanizations on this night, yay!)--but it turned out to actually be a really terrific adventure. A couple of times I got chatted up by race regulars who were pleased to see so many kids at the track and wanted to reminisce about their own childhood memories of going to the races with their parents, and all the workers seemed happy to go out of their way to make the sport accessible to the bunch of random kids running around. After one race, which the kids and I watched from right by the finish line, Syd was bummed because the horse that she was rooting for didn't win, and she said, "Why didn't #6 win? She was running so fast!"

The track's photographer happened to be walking by, on his way to photograph a horse that was NOT #6 in the Winner's Circle, but he stopped, came back to Syd, and explained to her, "Number Six didn't win because she started out too fast, and she couldn't keep it up. You've got to root for the horse that comes second or third or even fourth out of the gate, not first."

In the next two races, Syd indeed rooted for a horse that was not first out of the gate, and indeed, in both of those races, that horse that she rooted for won! 

Definitely educational, then, but I'm not sure what subject to call it. PE? Game theory? 

My Latest: Sewing for Big Kids and a Battle Royale

a round-up of free sewing patterns and tutorials for big kids

a discussion of the Japanese dystopian novel, Battle Royale

and a write-up of the pajamas that I sewed for Will out of a vintage Dr. Seuss sheet

That genuine smile of Will's... you don't often see it in a posed photograph. I've got tons of candids of her, tons of photos of her intent on an activity, tons of her gamely posing with artwork or national monuments, etc., but if you ask her to smile for your photograph, she all of a sudden can't seem to figure out how her face works. Does one smile by stretching one's lips and raising one's shoulders? Baring one's teeth and widening one's eyes? Stiffening one's spine and gritting one's teeth? My strategy when I need *something* other than a blank stare is to chat with her while blasting the shutter a million times a minute, flipping through the images later in search of a usable, if not necessarily smiling, expression. Syd's strategy is a little more direct:

And that's actually how I got my shot!

 If only one could have all of one's photo shoots done while turning cartwheels:

That's a pretty workable shot, actually--not a lot of detail, but you can certainly see the garment as a whole!