Sparkle

Although they're cheapest right before Independence Day, sparklers?

They're an all-summer after-dark treat around here.

Chalkboard Building Blocks

A pony corral.

Flowers.


An ocean on which a LEGO ship can sail.

A place to put one's signature.

Race cars.

Dinosaur food.

A city.

Trees and grass inside a deep, dark forest where unicorns roam.

A pretty pattern.


Dice.

A fashion model's runway.

Stairsteps up a pyramid, with a secret language hidden underneath each tread.


Suffice to say, the little girls adore their chalkboard building blocks.

To make your own, check out my chalkboard building blocks tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Quill Pen Compositions

Last year during our big Boston trip, Matt's parents took all of us for a day at Plimoth Plantation. Honestly, Plimoth itself was not my favorite tourist spot--it's one of those recreated villages, and I am just not comfortable walking up to a stranger minding her own business grinding corn and being all, "Hello, who are you? What are you doing? How long will that corn last? What's your preferred method for making corn pone?" like you were supposed to do.

Mostly I tooled around and took in the kitchen gardens, and snuck into people's huts to stare after they had walked out of them, and the Wampanoag village was actually pretty awesome, but I did do some damage in the gift shop. I bought the girls little porcelain Pilgrim dolls (and I wish now that I'd bought Sydney the big ones, too), and a cornhusk doll-making kit, and seeds to grow a Three Sisters garden, and lots of postcards for scrapbooks, and a quill pen making and writing kit.

When I buy stuff that's on big sale, or stuff that's unique in that way, I throw it all into my Magic Craft Cupboard, and whenever the time is right it comes back out again.

Let's see...the girls still play with the Pilgrim dolls, we made the cornhusk dolls back in the winter, we didn't end up doing the Three Sisters garden this summer because the Tom Thumb popcorn looked more exciting in the seed packet than the Plimoth Plantation corn did (but I think the seeds will keep for another year, so def a Three Sisters garden next year), the postcards will probably come out again this fall when we'll study pilgrims again, and that quill pen kit just happened to look mighty tasty just recently when Sydney and I were reading some book or other about the Declaration of Independence (Independence Day has been an area of interest lately, obviously), and she said that she wished that she could write with the pretty feather, too.

You do, huh? Well, let's take a trip to the Magic Craft Cupboard and see what we find!

I used my x-acto knife in dangerous ways to cut each girl's quill at an angle, carve it into a nib, angle the nib, then slit it up the middle a little, while the girls used eye droppers to drip water into their powdered ink to rehydrate it. Then I handed each girl her quill and a giant piece of textured artist's paper, attempted to demonstrate how to properly hold the quill (they weren't such good listeners, sigh), and let them go:

I did ask each girl to write her name with the quill pen--we'll crop them later and put them in their Independence Day scrapbooks:

Ignore the fact that they both keep holding their quills backwards--my theory is that kids these days only ever use writing instruments with rotational symmetry, and thus the concept of one specific pen grip is too foreign to get right away.

Writing all kinds of words was fun--

--but Willow, especially, got really into the artistry of pen and ink, and covered a whole huge page just beautifully, in my opinion:

Everybody loved using the quill pens, but all I can tell you is that after using quill pens as one's sole writing instrument, the using for the first time an ink pen that didn't require pausing to dip it into ink every few letters must have felt AMAZING.

Ink pens just aren't this pretty, however:

Here are some other Declaration of Independence resources that we've been enjoying this month:

Declaration of Independence recreation from Fat Brain Toys

Google images and Western Writing Implements: In the Age of the Quill Pen for quill pen pics

Rice Pillows

When I labored with Sydney, I didn't have jack shit to help me out, because my doula, my birthing ball, my essential oils, my rice sock, my hot shower, my midwife, and my friends who were going to babysit Willow were all several hours away back home in Indiana, while I was in Michigan going into labor six weeks early. Oops.

When I labored with Willow, however, although I only wish that I'd had a doula, I did have my birthing ball, my essential oils, my hot shower, my midwife, and this really awesome tube sock filled with rice that I'd made at my natural birthing class.

Good lord, I loved that rice sock. I would have married it if I didn't already have this guy next to me who'd gone and knocked me up. He's the reason that I got introduced to the rice sock, however, so he and I are still good.

The joy of a rice sock (or a rice pillow, as you'll see in a bit), is that rice holds its heat really, really well, and it's a kind of steamy, very soothing heat, as well, far better than a heating pad, similar to a hot water bottle but much longer-lasting. You simply microwave the rice sock for about a minute, and then you've got around an hour's worth of heat, packaged in this soft, hefty container that, because of the weight of the rice, really seems to penetrate. Mmmmmm.....get the idea?

Of course, I giant tube sock filled with several pounds of dried rice is really best suited for pregnant people with their giant bellies, so I did eventually pass on my precious, butt-ugly rice sock to a pregnant cousin, and to replace it I made a family's worth of flannel rice pillows, smaller but still hefty, as sturdy as a tube sock but with much softer, MUCH prettier fabric. Goofy fabric, for the most part, since the girls mostly chose it.

And one day last week, Sydney helped me photograph them to list in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:

Blue and Butterflies Rice Pillow

A Little Helper

Hearts and Rainbows Pink Flannel Rice Pillow

Pink and Ponies Flannel Rice Pillow

Just Plain Pink Flannel Rice Pillow

 There's that Little Helper Again

Soon I'll perhaps be able to delegate all the photography into her capable hands!

A Horse and Pony Obstacle Course

Otherwise known as two sisters playing together quite happily and with no shrieking, name calling, tattletelling, pushing, pinching, biting, hitting, or crying, thank goodness:

I had ordered some specific blocks from Barclay Blocks to make up chalkboard building block sets to sell this summer (mental note: snap photos and list on etsy!), and, as I always do whenever I order from Barclay Blocks, I threw in 20 pounds of scrap blocks for five bucks. Five bucks! Twenty pounds! Even though it bumps up the shipping cost quite a bit, it's nevertheless a complete steal.

I would be ashamed to admit to you exactly how many building blocks we now own, but I consider it fair. After all, some women indulge in shoes, while other women indulge in make-up. I own two pairs of shoes and no make-up, and probably a hundred pounds of much-beloved building blocks.

I like my indulgences best.

At the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Such a good museum.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has a lot going for it. With elements of an old-school natural history museum, it's still got plenty of those stuffed animal dioramas that we're all suckers for in our family, and lots of minerals behind glass cases to pore over, and explications of plate tectonics, etc., but it's also an ASTC passport site, which means we get in free(!!!), AND it has what amounts to a small zoo out back, with cool animals like raccoons and red foxes and barn owls that are far more novel to the girls than the elephants and giraffes that they've seen in every zoo that they've been to since birth.

I thought that the galleries were set up nicely, as well, with ample room for photographs in the dinosaur gallery, and as we found much in the museum to fit in with the girls' current areas of interest, I took lots of photos that will soon be mounted on timelines and in scrapbooks and put to other good homeschool uses:

Sydney and the Haplocanthosaurus

Willow and the Dimetrodon

Willow and the T. Rex

Willow and Sydney and the Triceratops

The sign said that Lucy, the Australopithecus aferensis model pictured here, was, although a full-grown female, the size of a modern six-year-old child. What do you think?

Hmmm...definitely a little taller than a five-year-old child:

Life Cycle of the Silkworm

Considering that I had begun the day disappointed that the previous day's craft fair had been pretty much a bust and thus we were not going to be sightseeing at the zoo or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at which we'd have to pay admission, I finished up delighted with Museum of Natural History.

Now if only Syd hadn't pitched a fit in the gift shop, requiring that she be immediately perp-walked back to the car empty-handed, I could have bought that Evolution Happens bumper sticker that I really wanted, and then the day would have been completely perfect!

This is How We Pack?

Before you head off for a weekend trip, don't you:

set the chalkboard blocks out to air-dry after one last coat:

and then spray paint the shopping cart:

We do, apparently--at least those are the last-minute chores that we found ourselves hurrying to finish before we set off for a weekend in Cleveland. It was a weekend full of Bazaar Bizarre, the Great Lakes Science Center, banana splits, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and barbecue. We came home in time for parades, gymnastic, mowing the lawn, riding bicycles, and Geomags, and now Matt's fixing the girls grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner before their early bedtime (no late-night fireworks show for us this year!), after which he and I will collapse in bed with Baked Lays, Harry Potter, hard lemonade, and ideally our own early bedtime.

Yawn.