We Left the Kids at Home and Went to Chicago: Day 1 at Indiana Dunes National Park

Indiana Dunes has grown up since that cold, rainy day six years ago that I took my freezing, uncomfortable children to Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

It's now Indiana Dunes National Park!

Earlier this summer, Matt and I undertook upon a Big Experiment, designed to answer an Important Question: what chaos would occur if we left our children home alone and went on a long weekend trip without them?

The kids both thought that this experiment was a fabulous idea, even Will (Will loves to travel, while Syd loathes it). I don't think it was necessarily the added trust and responsibility that enticed them, but the freedom to stare at their screens for 60 hours straight without an adult asking them to do something to prevent their muscles from atrophying or to get some Vitamin D absorbed into their skin.

In other words, everyone was looking forward to a quite pleasant long weekend!

If you were to leave two teenagers home alone, what would be your biggest fear for them? For me, it was that they'd choke, of all things! Like, I literally did not leave them any grapes. I reminded them how to do the Heimlich on themselves against a countertop. Whenever I talked to one of them while we were gone, I'd be all, "Where is your sister? When is the last time you saw her? Go do a wellness check while I'm on the phone with you."

Spoiler alert: nobody choked, and on this day in particular, while the kids were holed up in separate rooms staring at screens and ignoring each other and the beautiful day outside, Matt and I were hanging out together, soaking in that beautiful day and all the Vitamin D it had to offer:

Not gonna lie: I thought this was a nuclear power plant and I'm a little disappointed that it's not.

Check out how you can see the Chicago skyline from here. We're going to be part of that skyline in just a few hours!

There weren't a ton of people on the beaches on this random Friday afternoon in July, so Matt and I could walk along the lakeshore and explore while pretending that we had the whole place to ourselves.

We've just come directly from the orientation film in the visitor's center (I mean, of COURSE!), so I'm all excited to see the real-life evidence of the interaction between the dunes and the land beyond it:

Mt. Baldy, in particular, is creeping inland quite quickly, and it was interesting to see it covering trees and encroaching on former walking paths:

Since you know that one of my Special Interests is People in Peril in National Parks, you won't be surprised that one of the reasons I wanted to see Mt. Baldy is because of this incident in which a six-year-old fell into a hole that mysteriously opened up in the dune. I'm fascinated by the new science that the near-disaster uncovered, and the fact that it's still not 100% understood.

Also not 100% understood: the corpse of this terrifying lake creature:

Do we or do we not think it's weird that the Great Lakes have no giant underwater creatures living in them?

I don't know if the many fallen trees and pieces of driftwood are further pieces of evidence of erosion from the dunes, or if they come from elsewhere, but they were beautiful and interesting and we took lots of photos:

Before we left to finish our drive to Chicago, I came to my senses and remembered that I couldn't keep any of the pretty rocks I'd been collecting because we were, duh, in a NATIONAL PARK, so I took a picture of my favorite and then sadly put them all back:

Next stop: Chicago!!!

How to Add a Hood to a T-shirt Pattern

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 When you're sewing a T-shirt, adding a hood is one of the easier modifications to the pattern that you can make. It's a modification that also looks a lot harder to do than it is, so get ready to impress all of your friends with your mad sewing skills! 

 To make a hooded T-shirt, you will need: 

  a good T-shirt pattern. I'm using the Oliver + S School Bus T-shirt pattern, which you can read my review of here. 

  a well-fitting hoodie. It should be made from a fabric similar to what you'll be using for your T-shirt, so a sweatshirt with a hood won't work here. I don't always love tutorials that ask you to copy something that you already own--if you own one, do you really need to make another?--but this is the quickest and easiest way to draft a hood pattern. Other options include reading up on how to draft a hood pattern from scratch, or simply asking your buddies if they have a hoodie that you can borrow for five minutes. 

  jersey knit fabric. The blue fabric for this shirt is upcycled from other T-shirts, but the black fabric is store-bought jersey knit. You can see that they both work well here. 

  sewing supplies. Don't forget the ballpoint needle for your sewing machine! 

 1. Trace the hood. I have some extra tips for copying an existing piece of clothing here. Seriously, masking tape is your friend! 

 Note the general shape of the hood in the photo above. No matter what hood you copy, that general shape should be the same. Pay special attention to the curve at the neckline--that's key to a hood that will fit the shirt's neckline well. 

  2. Make modifications. You want your hood to slightly overlap at the front--you can get a view of what this will look like both in the top photo here and in the top photo of my review of the Oliver + S School Bus T-shirt pattern. The degree of overlap is up to you, and there's a lot of wiggle room. 

In this shirt, for instance, the overlap is maybe an inch, but I sewed a second hooded T-shirt this weekend with a hood overlap of at least three inches, and although it felt like a lot as I was sewing it, it looked totally fine and normal on the kid, and she declared that she liked it even better than the first hood. So there you go. 

 3. Add seam allowance. You'll need seam allowance for the bottom and the top/back, and a hemming allowance for the front. I've gone into detail in a previous post about how to enlarge a curve on a pattern, so you should be all set! 

 4. Cut out the pattern pieces and sew. You'll need two hood pieces, and you'll immediately sew them together to create the complete hood. You won't need the neckband from your T-shirt pattern. Instead, you'll sew the hood on in place of the neckband, centering the back seam of the hood onto the center of the back piece of the T-shirt, then sewing all the way around, overlapping the front pieces of the hood at the center of the front piece of the T-shirt. 

 You can further modify this hood by adding trim to the front edge or the middle seam (think pony mane or dinosaur spikes), or making it deeper and taller (think wizard's hood).

We Have a Raspberry Pi

 

If your kid isn't tooling around with Raspberry Pi, are you even a homeschooler?

We finally joined the world of homeschoolers who tool around with Raspberry Pi thanks to this Kano computer kit:

We've actually had it for ages, with Syd, especially, eager to unbox it and play, but dang, did her public school schedule leave zero time for any extracurricular educational fun! This summer, though, I've been taking both kids through the Girl Scout CSA Think Like a Programmer Journey--Syd needs a Journey under her belt so she can start thinking about Gold, and Will, as usual, wants to Summit at the Ambassador level. Even though the Think Like a Programmer Journey is more about learning and utilizing the logical, step-by-step, user-centered problem-solving sequence that programmers use than about actual, literal computer programming, you know I had to sneak in the actual, literal computer programming.

Starting with putting together your own computer!

The manual is super cute and perfectly suited to walking even young kids through assembling the computer parts while explaining what each part is, what it does, and how it works with the other parts:

And when you're finished, you hook it up to the TV, which the kids thought was exceptionally fun and charming:

The little games and apps that are already installed on the Kano are below the kids' interest and experience level, unfortunately, although they did play around with them a bit. What we're most looking forward, to, though, is playing around more with that Raspberry Pi! I have requested just about every iteration of Raspberry Pi for Dummy Idiot Kids books for us from the library, and I hope that soon the Raspberry Pi programming experimentation will commence!

And Now My Kid is Getting a Credit Card: Earning the Girl Scout Ambassador Good Credit Badge

In case you ever wonder why my kid's Girl Scout vest always looks sort of ratty, it's because of stuff like this!

I'm just trying to take photos of some of the new badges and fun patches that I sewed onto Will's vest, but somehow I've instead created a nap landing spot for Gracie:

Next question: is she attempting to frame or to hide the newest badges that I'm trying to photograph?

Answer: Hide them. She's DEFINITELY trying to hide them:

She can't outlast me, though! She always gets hungry for canned cat food before I do!

Here, then, is Will's newest Girl Scout badge: the Ambassador Good Credit badge!

I am often wowed by how just plain USEFUL Girl Scout badges are! Like yes, fine, I did need a Girl Scout badge as an excuse to teach my children valuable life skills multiple times in their lives already. Girl Scout badges were their gateway into learning how to complete a sales transaction (from both sides of the counter), do laundry, make small talk, open their own bank accounts, start a camp fire, learn CPR, and write a business letter. 

And now a Girl Scout badge is the reason that my kid is getting a credit card.

The Girl Scout Ambassador Good Credit badge is a super useful introduction to the nonsensical world of imaginary money that is our credit system, and because it involves traipsing through so much of a family's personal financial information, it's a terrific badge for a Girl Scout to do independently. Matt and I provided much of the resources that Will used to earn this badge, and I think that it helped our entire family be more thoughtful about our financial future.

STEP 1: GET THE SCOOP ON CREDIT SCORES.

To learn about credit scores, Will first read some interesting articles online. This one is mostly about credit utilization ratios, but includes a lot of other general information about what makes up someone's credit score, and this one is mostly about how to improve your credit score, and so contains even more of the same type of information.

It also contains this very interesting piece of advice:

"Your length of credit history plays a role in your credit score. FICO bases 15 percent of your credit score on factors such as the age of your oldest account and your average age of all accounts. Older is better. [...] If a friend or relative adds you to an existing credit card as an authorized user, it might help lengthen your credit history." ("How to improve your credit score" Bankrate.com)

That got me thinking that in the near future, it actually would be handy to have Will as an authorized user on our credit card. She'll be driving soon, so not only does she need an emergency source of money, but it would be handy if she could gas up the car or grab a few groceries if she's out. And for the long-term, it sounds like being an authorized user on our card would both increase Will's direct credit history and possibly benefit her additionally due to the fact that we've had our credit cards longer than we've had her. 

I know y'all have probably already thought of all this practical stuff in terms of your own teenagers, but I apparently need a Girl Scout badge to teach me how to parent. 

Another useful thing that Matt and I did for this step was, of course, obtain our own credit scores. We sat down with Will and walked her through the information there, showing her the list of accounts both open and closed, the payment histories, etc. Fortunately, there was no wonky information that needed to be corrected, but if there had been, that would have been a good lesson to walk through with her, too!

STEP 2: FIND OUT HOW BANK LOANS WORK.

The postal service hand-delivered us almost all of the materials that we needed to complete this badge! When the mortgage bill came, Matt and I also went over it with Will. I guess it's good to get over your sticker shock about what interest rates actually look like when you're young! I didn't learn until my own first mortgage how much of one's payments go toward paying interest, and it was a very unpleasant realization.

If I'd wanted more enrichment work in this step, I could have had Will makes some charts of our mortgage, interest, and payments over time, or have her calculate what would happen if we made extra payments. It's also very useful to learn the effectiveness of paying down one's debt!

STEP 3: LEARN THE INS AND OUTS OF CREDIT CARDS.

Thanks again to the post office for this step! For a few weeks, we collected the credit card offers that came in our junk mail. Will read this article on how to evaluate credit cards as a young adult, and then she opened all our junk mail, researched each offer, looked up more info about each credit card online, and then compared and evaluated the cards. She came up with her own criteria for evaluation, and now has a better understanding of what she should look for when considering signing up for a new credit card.

STEP 4: GATHER REAL-LIFE BORROWING STORIES.

This was an interesting component of this badge, because the Gold Award project that Will's working on actually involves teaching/encouraging kids to interview the elderly people in their lives. So not only did Will get to practice more interview skills herself, but this step also got her thinking about what other Girl Scout badges could benefit from specific instruction about how to best interview older folks, and now she's got more content for her project!

STEP 5: WRITE YOUR OWN CREDIT COMMITMENT.

It had never before occurred to me to ask Will to map out her financial future, but it was a very enlightening task that got her thinking about her future wants and needs and how she might incorporate them into her life plans.

OMG, you know what else happened during the course of this badge? As I was researching it, I saw several places the piece of advice that you should compare local banks to make sure that your money is earning the best interest rates. Matt and I have long bitched about how insultingly, laughably small the interest rate for our savings account is--like, it would be less offensive if they didn't even pay us any interest at this point--so I checked out the websites of some of the other banks in town...

...and learned that our local credit union's interest rate for a comparable savings account is literally over ten times our own bank's interest rate.

So we switched banks.

Here are some of the books that Will and I consulted while earning this badge:

It also just occurred to me that the podcast about scammers that Syd and I obsessively listen to is perfect for this badge!

P.S. Want to see more useful projects with teenagers as they happen? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Upcycle a Coloring Book Page into a Bookmark

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

Need another idea for how to upcycle a coloring book page? Here's how to turn it into a sturdy bookmark, the easy way! 

 My kids and I love coloring books, as I'm sure you can tell from all of the tutorials that I post on ways to upcycle coloring book pages. Well, here's one more for you! 

 This coloring book page bookmark looks especially nice when made from one of those adult coloring book pages with lots of patterns, or when fussy cut to pick out an extra-cute detail from a larger coloring book page. It's also a good way to upcycle a coloring book page that the artist has abandoned partway through--you know they NEVER go back to finish those old pages. 

 If you use a page that's colored by a kid, these also make great little handmade gifts to family and friends. When going through the latest stack of finished coloring pages, for instance, I found a couple of springtime pages that will look great made into bookmarks and tucked into Easter cards for the grandparents. Want to try it out for yourself? Read on! 

 You will need: 

  coloring page. You can use anything that you want for this, although remember that coloring books made from cheap paper are NOT acid-free. They're fine for short-term use in a book, but you wouldn't want to put one of those bookmarks in a book and then forget about it for twenty years. 

Many adult coloring books advertise that they use acid-free paper, however, and because I have two kids, we have a family rule that if you want to color something from a "nice" coloring book, you have to photocopy it first. This increases the playability of the coloring book, makes for a more satisfying coloring experience, as the kids usually choose to copy their page onto cardstock so that they can use permanent markers or our artist-quality colored pencils, and generally means that the finished product will be acid-free. 

  backing material. Again, you've got a lot of choice in this. You want a sturdy back to your bookmark, because wishy-washy bendy bookmarks SUCK, and also because your coloring book page probably has another drawing on the back or bleed-through from the front. My favorite backing material is adhesive card stock, although you'll see that I use duct tape for a couple of the bookmarks below. Other options include any sort of card-weight paper and your own adhesive. 

  hole punch and embroidery floss or yarn. This adds the perfect last detail to your bookmark. Feel free to also add beads! 

 1. Back and fussy cut the bookmark. I like to apply my backing paper first, even though it does make the placement less accurate.

Applying the backing first, though, makes the bookmark easier to trim without getting adhesive onto your scissors. 

Cut the bookmark to shape and then add the backing and THEN trim, however, if fussy cutting the absolutely perfect bookmark is your highest priority. 

  2. Hole punch and add yarn or embroidery floss. I like to use double the length of my bookmark in embroidery floss. I knot it at the bookmark, then knot each of the threads near the end to prevent unraveling. You can use several pieces of embroidery floss at one time, if you want. It makes the bookmark look even nicer!

She Earned Another Made-Up Badge: The Girl Scout "Homesteading" Badge

 

When my Girl Scouts were younger, I'd hear the leaders of older Girl Scouts gripe about the small selection of badges available for Cadettes, Seniors, and Ambassadors. I didn't get it at the time, because goodness, there were more badges around than my Brownie and Junior could ever possibly earn, and a whole slew of retired badges and fun patches, to boot!

But now that I have a Senior and an Ambassador Girl Scout, I see that the problem isn't so much the smaller selection, because there are still more official badges than my kids could do during their time in Girl Scouts, but the variety. Kids are always going to be super excited about some stuff and not excited at all about other stuff, but if you take out the not-so-exciting badges from the official GSUSA line-up... well, those gripey leaders had a point.

So I've been happily, unabashedly letting my entire troop remix or just plain make up badges. GSUSA doesn't have a current older-level basic camping badge, so I bought a set of retired Camping IPs and we made up the requirements to earn it. GSUSA doesn't have a badge for encouraging kids to have an immersive experience with books, so when a subset of my troop was into Percy Jackson, we bought a made-up Percy Jackson badge and made up the requirements to earn it. GSUSA doesn't have a travel badge for Ambassadors, so I'm right now in the process of collecting some retired Traveler IPs and later this year... yep, we'll make up the requirements to earn it!

Will is interested in various homesteading skills at the moment. Some much older retired badges do cover some of those skills, but there was nothing that was affordable, not too precious to put on a busy Girl Scout vest, and covering the skill set that interested Will the most. However, we thought this made-up badge would work quite well as a Homesteading badge, so I bought it--and we made up the requirements to earn it!

And here they are!

1. Research the square-foot gardening concept. Create and grow a square-foot garden for one season. 

For this step, I gave Will several cinderblocks, bags of soil, and newspapers, and showed her how to make a quick-and-dirty raised bed garden. She raised herself a fine crop of strawberries in it!

Other possibilities for this step were creating and growing container gardens, or helping an adult build a cold frame and using it to grow out-of-season greens.

2. Learn how to make your own jam. 

What to do with that fine crop of strawberries? Make jam, of course!

For this step, I taught both kids how to make freezer jam and cooked, canned jam, and the additional trick of laying out washed, topped strawberries on a cookie sheet, freezing them, and then tumbling them into a larger freezer container. Since they're already frozen, they won't stick together in that larger container, and you can just scoop some out whenever you want smoothies or muffins.

It's that life hack that has become an unconscious standard practice!

3. Learn how to use the dehydrator. 

I'd thought that Will might like to learn how to dehydrate her own dried fruit and fruit leather, but instead she ended up helping me deal with a sudden bounty of herbs and greens. I'm going to be really happy this winter that I have so much raw kale in the freezer and all those jars of dehydrated kale and dehydrated oregano in the pantry. 

Other possibilities for this step were learning how to make pickles or sauerkraut, both of which are super easy to do, and my kids LOVE them. 

4. Carve something useful from wood.

Here's Will at our most recent troop camping trip working on her wooden spoon:

She used her pocket knife while at camp, but mostly she used this wood carving kit that is probably the best gift the Easter Bunny's ever brought the kids!

She carved herself a quite serviceable spoon, lightly polished with olive oil and beeswax and absolutely perfect for all of our rustic culinary adventures. 

Other possibilities for this step were learning how to knit or crochet and making a washcloth to prove it!

5. Learn how to make cold-process soap from scratch.

This was definitely our most time-consuming project! I came into it with a big head on my shoulders, having made cold-process soap a few times before, and having taught Syd to make it just a few years ago, but I definitely got knocked down ALL the pegs when our first TWO batches of soap didn't turn out!

What I finally learned after doing the Googling that I should have done in the beginning is that it was my decade-old lye's fault. And now I own a brand-new five-dollar giant bottle of lye, so I guess my goal is to use it up in soapmaking sometime BEFORE the next decade...

Well, we got a good start this summer!

Will made a lovely soap with olive oil, coconut oil, and powdered milk--

--and that lye, of course! Check out its pH, because you KNOW we never pass up a chance to test some shocking pH:

If you don't try to use sus lye, cold-process soap actually IS very simple. It's mostly stirring--

--until you reach trace--

--pouring it into an empty oatmeal canister to finish saponifying--

--removing it from the container when it's hardened and slicing it--

--and then leaving it to cure, every so often admiring how beautiful it is:

Isn't it gorgeous? It's actually inspired me to want to try some different recipes, but I've got to figure out what I'd put it in, because that was our only oatmeal container!

6. Bake bread from scratch.

Have you noticed yet that most of Will's activities are ones that are suspiciously very helpful to ME?!? Mwa-ha-ha! But yeah, I hate to cook, so I am always looking for ways to encourage someone else to cook instead of me. I taught Will to make this no-knead bread, which also happens to be the easiest, most delicious bread in existence, so now that she knows how to make it, I hope she makes it for us lots!

Other possibilities for this step were learning about rain barrels and helping her dad reinstall and maintain ours, or letting me teach her how to sharpen knives. I would appreciate having someone else around who can sharpen knives, but it's also nice to eat homemade bread that I didn't have to bake myself!

7. Level up your animal husbandry skills.

I left this option kind of open, mostly because there are, in my opinion, SO MANY animal husbandry tasks that need to be done around here! The pets are about as feral as the kids!

Will chose to focus on her chickens. She spent a lot of time making a nursery area to keep the pullets away from the big chickens (they defeated her gatekeeping system almost immediately, but so far the big chickens just seem to ignore the little ones), and then giving the whole flock more entertainment options for those days when she doesn't allow them to free-range. Got to be unpredictable so you foil the foxes!

And that's how Will spent part of her summer learning some very useful skills! Now she can start and grow a garden, preserve what she grows, bake herself delicious bread, make herself gourmet soap, and carve the spoon she can use to spread that homemade jam on that delicious bread.

OMG and now I'm realizing that I should totally go and have her do exactly that! If you can celebrate completing a badge by eating bread and jam, then you really HAVE made up the perfect badge!