Battle of the Home-Sewn Shorts: Oliver + S Bedtime Story Pajama Shorts

Near-ish the end of summer: the perfect time for a kid to have a growth spurt, wouldn't you say?

Will has spent years at almost the same waist size, shooting up primarily in height. This means that each summer she could wear the shorts of the summer before, if they hadn't gotten TOO short, and the pants of the winter before, only we called them capris.

In the course of just the last month, though, the kid has not only shot up again in height, but also gained an entire inch in her waist measurement. All those old shorts and pants? They're gone, baby.

These days, I generally only buy kids' clothes if they're 1) dirt-cheap (think garage sale), 2) vintage (think Syd's Partridge Family dress--squee!), 3) ridiculously fancy and therefore impractical to make at home (think party dresses for Syd), or 4) cheap but with an awesome print (think all of Will's dinosaur/Star Wars/comic book T-shirts), and even then only if they're thrifted.

Everything else, from underwear to pants to pajamas, I've been trying to make myself. So in the next few weeks, I'll be testing out a few of the kids' shorts patterns that I've gathered here and there, to find the ultimate pattern for home-sewn picky child shorts.

This Oliver + S Bedtime Story pajama pants pattern wasn't intended to be sewn as shorts, but since the pants are pretty much straight-legged, I just measured up 12" from the bottom hem and then folded the pattern there to make the longer shorts length that I prefer--shorts that cover the knee are obviously going to suffer a lot more wear at the knee, but I prefer my fair-skinned babies more covered than not, generally. Not that you'd know this if you lived near me, since I struggle on a daily basis to keep a single stitch of clothing on them as they play out in the yard, but sun protection is always a good thing in my book.

The Oliver + S pants pattern was really simple to work up, which will be great if I want to make multiples, but my favorite thing about Oliver + S patterns is how no matter how simple the pattern, there are always some special details, such as a separate waistband and binding for the bottom hem, allowing me to do them in a coordinating print:

Again, I just really like the length of these shorts, and the fit is roomy without being TOO roomy, you know?

Of course Sydney, wearing a leotard and cut-offs of last winter's pants, also feels the need to model:

How did I come to have children this unutterably ridiculous?

Will prefers to wear her shorts with a plain white T-shirt (oh, the agonies that I suffer to keep those damn things white!):

The shorts have clearly passed her test, because she can wear them unimpeded as she climbs every single thing in creation, which is her second-favorite pastime:

The shorts also work well with her most favorite pastime, of course:

Also in contention, to be duked out in future blog posts, are a vintage Simplicity pajama pants pattern, the pajama pants pattern from Heather Ross' Weekend Sewing, and a second Oliver + S pants pattern, all cut down into shorts.

Homeschooling from the Dollar Bin at Target

I shop at Target seasonally--after Halloween when the costumes are cheap, after Christmas when the twinkle lights are cheap, after Valentine's Day when the heart-themed crap is cheap, and during the back-to-school sales, during which this year I bought 60 Elmer's glue sticks for $10, each girl's very own choice of notebook for a quarter each, and a handful of boxes of crayons, also for a quarter each.

That, plus my big purchases in other places of all four volumes of the Story of the World activity books, both of the Minimus Latin books, and the balance scale, and my school shopping is done and done!

However, and y'all probably know this already, but Target? Right when you walk in the door they have all these bins of cheap-o junk that costs a buck! Mostly I zip on by the cheap-o junk, thoughtlessly repeating in a monotone, "No, no, no, no, no, no..." as my girlies ask for every single thing in every single bin as we walk by. But this time...this time!

Cheap-o educational junk!

And that's how my school shopping also apparently includes six different types of flashcards, everything from astronomy to the presidents (the girls enjoy looking through these on car trips), dice, dry erase boards (which, honestly, are of such low quality that I now regret having purchased them, but if they can stand the daily use that I'm subjecting them to through Christmas, I'll be happy again), playing cards (add hot glue to your mental picture of these cards--stand by for a post on that fun project!), and puzzles that diagram the Earth's make-up--

--and give the name and face of all the presidents of the United States:

Which has apparently locked me into a second trip to Target this season, since we now need to buy a set of playing cards to use as playing cards, not building materials.

Might as well buy some more crayons while we're there.

Playing with Play Silks at the Park

I've seen a lot of methods proposed by the crafty mommy bloggers for getting good photos of the kids with your handmade stuff, but the strategy that works best for me when I need to set up a photo shoot, such as this one for my Dharma Acid Dyes review over at Crafting a Green World, is to take the kids and the stuff to the park, then simply stand back and click my shutter a lot:

Seems to work well, yes?

Poetry Speaks: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The memorization of the girls' second long poem was a long time in coming. Unlike the process of memorizing "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which they probably could have listened to eight times a day for the entire Christmas season, the girls got tired of listening to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, before they had it memorized, so we set it aside for a good, long while.

I imagine that another factor is the fact that "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is available at our library in a dozen different copies with different illustrators, so that each repetition had new aspects, and I was even able to download a coloring book version of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" so that the girls could make their own book. Our library only had one picture book of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" for us to work with, unfortunately, so eventually it got a little old and we dropped it.

I keep checking the book out, however, and recently it occurred to me that Willow absolutely, and Sydney to a lesser extent, really have the poem almost memorized, so I brought the book back out and suggested that if they worked to read it over just a few more times, they could probably finish learning it by heart and be ready to recite it.

Syd got frustrated and dropped the project after one try (which is fine--the poem will always be there), but Will happily took up the challenge:


Rote memorization is good for our brains, but--and this is super cheesy, so get ready--that's not really why I want my girls to memorize poetry. Poetry connects us all on an emotional level, allowing us a shared outlet for feelings that we all may own, but rarely have the sophistication to voice. Because of that, to memorize a poem isn't just to know it in your mind, but also to hold it in your heart. Poems are big things for little girls to hold in their hearts, but out of all of the lifetime's worth of things, both good and bad, that will eventually reside there, their hearts will always be the better for being tempered by a heavy dose of poetry.

Our version of the poem:

• Poetry for Kids: Robert Frost

Dancing to Dvorak with Daddy

Or, How One Man Wins the Household Father of the Year Contest. Every. Single. Year.

Balance Scale

The best way to introduce the girls to a tool like the balance scale without having to, you know, INTRODUCE them to it is to just leave it out enticingly on the table, all the little brass weights that go with it shiny and bright in the sun, and then to simply ignore it.

Little girls will weigh their shoes in it.

They will use it to compare their breakfast smoothies, to see who got more.

All the toy ponies in the house will ride in it.

It will be an all-encompassing activity at playdates:

And eventually it will be put away, and its coveted spot on the coffee table will be replaced by, I don't know...the microscope? Stethoscope? Watercolor pencils?

Decreeing the next week's new obsession is a heady power!

Here are the brass weights that we use, when we're not weighing ponies and coffee cups and LEGOs:
 

Maker Faire Detroit 2011

That's where I've been!

Ostensibly, we went to Maker Faire Detroit primarily for this:

Really, though, by the time that I've made everything and we've lugged it all there and Matt's hauled everything inside and I've set it all up exactly as I want it, you pretty much only need one adult to sit there and smile and sell things.

Everyone else, well...

can swing on the water pump swings:

There's a motion sensor on the swing that stops the water right as you pass underneath it, but perhaps because the girls are so small, or their swings are so short, the makers were horrified and the girls were THRILLED to discover that this sensor did not always function accurately for them. My soaking wet girls went back time after time after time.

and build spinning things at the gears table:

Don't you love those wooden gears?

and admire the fire-breathing robot pony:

and work industriously on our scratch block:

I traced the girls' handprints overlapping the block (because I was too cheap to buy two of them), and then they decorated, proudly:

The iron pour was another entire amazing event in itself, but I'll have to show you our wonderful finished iron tile later, on account of I was too excited to take pictures. Here's our waste block, though, there in the middle:


The girls constructed marshmallow shooters:

I think they're kind of gross, and I really want to sanitize the pieces in the dishwasher, but the girls have discovered infinite ways to blow a mini marshmallow into another person's mouth, so there you go, physics

Don't worry, you fans of Matt, he got to get his fanboy on, too:

We also spent some time just tooling about in the Henry Ford Museum, which has a genuine Oscar Meyer Weinermobile!


Including a D.I.Y. hot dog station:

I did have a really cute video of Willow putting all the toppings on top of Sydney as she lay in the bun, but right in the middle of it, somebody walked by behind me and shouted out to my child, "Be still, wiener!".

Fortunately, heckling is quite welcome at the modified Power Wheel races:

I did not buy the buttery leather steampunk chic superhero mask that I REALLY wanted, but I did buy a chainmail and rubber gasket stretchy arm cuff, and the girls made themselves some superhero masks to go with it:

Will was a little disappointed that she didn't get chosen to operate the crank to start the giant Rube Goldberg machine:


(listen carefully--did you hear the windshield crunch?), but tell me if I'm wrong, but does it or does it not look like she has a future in driving an iron scrap fire-breathing jungle gym disco station dragon welded to the top of a dump truck?

Don't worry--it's not breathing fire at the moment!

So you may be thinking, "Yeah, that looks fun and all, but where's the big Vegas-style finale? And also, it doesn't look like you got sticky at all!"

Well, you know what?


We got sticky.