Becoming Tinkerbell

In all the bustle of getting ready for Halloween and the kids' vacation with their grandparents, I'd completely forgotten that I'd actually snapped a few photos of Syd's design and construction process for her Tinkerbell outfit.

I didn't take a photo of what, to me, was the cutest moment: Syd watching a Tinkerbell movie, sketchbook and colored pencils around her, and pausing it every time Tinkerbell demonstrated a new pose that showed off a different aspect of her outfit. Syd recorded everything from Tinkerbell's hairdo to her pom-pom shoes in her sketchbook.

Thankfully, I had felt of an acceptable color in my fabric stash. I REALLY don't want to buy new fabric until I've used up the old, but I'm also putty-like in the face of a child's artistic determination, so I'm glad that I didn't even have to think about fighting that internal battle. I took Syd's measurements at her chest and from chest to knee, showed her how to transfer the measurements to graph paper, and here she is working out the bottom width of her garment:

Syd then sewed the side seams and top elastic casing, and later fringed the bottom:

I had assumed that tight elastic at the top of this dress would be enough to hold it in place, but on my straight little noodle, it was not. There goes my idea for a Trashion/Refashion Show garment that she can sew herself! I tightened the elastic several times, but finally ended up just instructing her to keep hitching it up. 

We used part of my wire hanger wings tutorial for Tinkerbell's wings--Syd sketched the template, but the wire hangers were too difficult for her to work with, so I bent the wire--but Syd rejected any sort of fabric overlay as being too far of a deviation from her original concept, so Matt did have to buy clear cellophane gift wrap from the Dollar Store and let Syd hot glue that to the wire frame:

Matt also took Syd to a shoe store so that she could ask for (and receive!) two of those cardboard shoe inserts that new shoes come with (it's been ages since I've bought the child new shoes, so who knows how she managed to remember those!), and her plan had been to paint them green, attach pom poms, and somehow adhere them to the tops of her regular shoes, but fortunately she finally decided that her dress and wings and hairstyle were enough--whew!

The child tells me that she wants to be a dress designer and hair stylist and ballerina when she grows up, but if you ask me, she has an affinity for engineering. We often joke that Will's perfect occupation would be the dictator-for-life of a small island nation, so I think Syd would be all set as her Czar of Public Works.

Sad Poem, Happy Poem

It's well-known in our house that I have a beef with American Life in Poetry. It's a newspaper column that appears in our paper on Sundays, and you'd think that with a national readership, Ted Kooser would choose poems that were both accessible to the average person and of a wide variety, so that everyone could discover that they do, indeed, love poetry.

Instead, our family's running joke is that I discover every week that once again, Kooser has chosen the Most Depressing Poem in the World to share with his readership. The joke goes that I read out the title, which often sounds quite happy--"Oh!" I say. "This one is entitled 'Early October Snow!' Doesn't that sound nice!" Then I begin to read the poem, which always does, indeed, start happily. "The poet is painting a lovely picture of a snowfall!" I exclaim contentedly.

But, alas, hints of a deeper darkness begin to emerge: "Hmmm, that imagery of the winter landscape laid out over the colorful autumn is a little sad..." Sometimes, Matt will actually take the paper from me at this point, if I've mentioned a pet or a child in the poem, and pre-read the rest of it. He will then inevitably shake his head in disapproval and recommend that I do not read on. I love a good poem, though, so generally I insist on having the paper back and read through to the end where, of course, I'm given a bleak piece of evidence of our own mortality. The pretty winter landscape superimposed over the autumn season is a metaphor for growing old, you see.

Everything and everyone that we love is going to die, but it doesn't matter, because we're going to die, too.

I swear, we do this every week, practically. Practically every single week!

It's the poems about children and animals, though, that I respond to with genuine upset. This poem, in particular, has become legend in our family, as I still sometimes bring it up--"The dog, Matt! They forgot the dog!!! Why is there such carelessness and cruelty in love?!? Why is everyone so horrible?!?"--but this poem about, sigh, a dead cat, had me sitting at the kitchen table and crying so much about Ballantine that Syd hugged me and promised to write me a happy poem.

And so she did:

It's not exactly a "poem" poem, but it is very happy, don't you think? I'm especially intrigued by the poet's imagery of perfect happiness residing in a place where people have never been. Evocative, yes?

Rice Paddy in a Bucket

Rice is a key component of our Artifacts of Ancient China study. We memorized the approximate beginning of its usage in settled agricultural communities (around 5000 BCE), and then the kids planted a miniature rice paddy in a bucket!

We're going to have to do this project again in the spring or summer to get the full effect, or I'm going to have to buy a grow light, because cool autumn days in the window of our front hallway was not the ideal growing condition for rice; nevertheless, we were able to carry the project along far enough to get a good idea of how growing rice works. Here's what we did:

1. Get a bucket. Buckets make excellent tools and playthings for children, and I pick them up wherever I find them in a good condition at a good price. The one that we used is a small-ish one from Lowe's.

2. Fill it halfway with dirt. We used potting soil for container plants in our rice paddy, and that was a mistake, as it was too light, and it wouldn't sink right when we added the water. It worked, so use it in a pinch, but next time I'm going to buy straight soil or composted manure or something similar instead of "potting soil."

3. Buy rice. We went to our local natural foods co-op and bought simple, organic brown rice from the bulk bin. This would be a fun time to expand the project, perhaps even for a science fair, as the kids discovered several varieties of rice in those bulk bins, and got pretty excited about the possibilities! I wasn't sure if this project would work at all, so I dissuaded them from experimenting, unfortunately, but in the spring/summer (or in science fair season!), I'll encourage them to choose as many varieties as they like, and we'll simply prepare a separate and labeled rice paddy for each.

4. Fill the bucket with water. Ideally, you want the water to be just a couple of inches over the level of the soil, but this didn't really work out with our potting soil, since about half of it floated! Weird. Again, the project still worked, but that soil choice at the beginning is very important.

5. Generously sprinkle in the rice. The bulk bin rice will sprout, but not very prolifically, so sow heavily.

6. Set the rice paddy in a warm spot. Keep an eye on it, and keep the water level high.

7. Observe! It was VERY exciting when the rice grains began to sprout, and even more so when they began to grow in earnest:

How fun is that? It's a real rice paddy! Of course, you can see in the photos that the potting soil is floating, and the rice is growing on top of that, so it never really gets under the water as it's supposed to. For this reason, we also had a mold problem on the surface, but since I knew from the beginning that we probably weren't going to be able to grow full rice plants for food in this chilly hallway, I just ignored it.

When the plants were several inches high, the rice paddy got smelly and stagnant, and so we knew it was time for the project to come to an end. Will didn't want to just dump it out, as I'd suggested, but she did carry it outside to die a natural death during our next hard freeze. 

She also did consent to pull a couple of rice sprouts so that we could look at them:

She's wearing safety goggles because she's on a break from smashing glass bottles with a hammer.

 Even though the project didn't work perfectly, it was a great one for cementing the timeline date, getting a visual of what a rice paddy looks like (in miniature), reviewing botany, and inspiring the kids towards further exploration.

Also, Will now knows that a stagnant rice paddy smells like "farts," so there's that, as well.

Autumn Play

Autumn here in Indiana has been gorgeous this year, and everyone has been outside enjoying it!

And thank goodness, too, because I'm already dreading winter.

Shiver.

Work Plans for the Week of November 3, 2014: Back to Work

The kids had a fabulous time on their vacation to California! Their grandparents took them to museums, and beaches, and tide pools, and LegoLand! In fact, their vacation was so educational (they're full of facts about tar pits now, and King Tut, and model trains), that I feel perfectly justified in giving them the first two days of this week off to unpack and get back into the groove.

I also signed Will up for a Minecraft Homeschool class whose orientation technically started last week, so she'll be having some extra time on the computer to complete her orientation lesson and get used to their map before she starts the class in earnest on Wednesday.

Playdates and classes and volunteer work will get the kids back into the swing of the school schedule, and we'll start our school week on Wednesday.

WEDNESDAY: I actually don't remember where the children have left off in their Math Mammoth curricula (gasp, I know!), so I'll have to get them to show me. It's somewhere in the time telling unit for Syd and the endless division unit for Will, though, so I'm not too lost.

Will is beginning her Minecraft Homeschool class on this day, and I'm not yet sure how much time it will take, so I've given it just the one school slot this week. Syd will be reading a biography of Florence Nightengale, as part of the kids' Girl Scout First Aid badge for both Brownies and Juniors--we're studying first aid through the lens of its professionals, since there are so many interesting people to learn about who work in the areas of medicine and civic safety.

Mostly on this day, though, there will be loads of clubs and classes! The kids are taking a class on wildcraft and medicinal herbs as part of our Girl Scout Co-op, they'll be attending their monthly online Magic Tree House Club meeting, and also attending their monthly LEGO Club meeting--their creations from the club meeting are displayed in the public library children's department all month, and this is thrilling for them.

THURSDAY: I've neglected music for a long, long time, but back when I was teaching it regularly, Syd loved the Hoffman Academy online piano lessons so much that I bought the written work that goes with it, and I'll be using it with both kids.

Song School Spanish will bring more Spanish vocabulary into our lives!

The kids (and I! I don't love ice skating, but I hate sitting on my butt more) have an ice skating date with our homeschool group on this afternoon, and we're also going to attend the dress rehearsal of the play "Pride and Prejudice" on this evening. I'm not sure if they'll actually like the graphic novel version enough to read it through, but I've also got an excellent infographic of the plot that they can look at, just so they know what's going on in the play.

FRIDAY: The AMC 8 problems that I'll be showing the kids today are one that requires a knowledge of mean and median (I'll have to show them that, as well, as they haven't encountered it before), and one that makes clever use of Pascal's triangle. The kids HAVE done Pascal's triangles before, so that one should be easy enough--more time to learn about mean and median!

Another option for math on this day is for the kids to re-enroll in their favorite math class, which is back to a time and day that we can make! I'd forgotten about that when I made these lesson plans, so I suppose I'll just present both options to the kids and see which they'd prefer.

Gee... I wonder?

The kids will also have to show me where we are in First Language Lessons. I was pleased to hear that during their plane ride, playing Mad Libs with the little guy sitting next to them, my kids "taught" him the parts of speech. I imagine that most of this involved a child reciting by rote, in monotone, definitions like "an adverb describes a verb, adjective, or other adverb" with little understanding of what she was saying, but still--it beats not having a definition for adverbs at all!

The kids might be interested in a more extensive unit on endangered and extinct animals, or this might be a one-off, but nevertheless, I know that Will loves origami, so when I came across this little lesson and origami passenger pigeon project, I immediately figured out a way to work it into the schedule.

I've also got the kids writing thank-you notes to the firefighters who led our fire station field trip; I'll ask the kids to include the new information that they learned on the trip, so it'll be a good culmination activity, as well. I've got some photos to print for them, and the kids will bake them some healthy muffins, and then we'll bring it all by to them on the weekend!

SATURDAY: Again, our weekend is ridiculously busy. Syd still has ballet twice on Saturdays--once for her class, and a second hour-long rehearsal for The Nutcracker in the afternoons--and Will is beginning her own two-hour rehearsals on Saturdays this week--she's preparing for an aerial silks performance! After Syd's afternoon rehearsal, we'll be driving up to Battle Ground, Indiana, for an evening program at Wolf Park (howling with the wolves!) and a visit to the battle ground and Prophetstown. I am a MAJOR Tecumseh fangirl, and I am SUPER excited. The kids don't know a ton about Tecumseh--it's just a sad period of history, you know?--but we've got The Story of the World chapters on him to listen to on the way there, and then I'll flesh the story out more for them as we walk around.

Sunday brings chess club for Will, maybe a hike for all of us (we've been working on cleaning up the giant 1960s-era dump at the very back of our woods, sigh), and plenty of time for board games, books, and play.

And probably more howling. I think that Wolf Park program is going to be FUN!

My Latest: Vampires, Zombies, and Elephants

a call to make elegrams

a round-up of wood slice projects (we have a LOT of tree limbs on our property!)

a tutorial for making Will's Moby Wrap vampire hood

and a discussion of zombies, and what it says about us that we like them so much

I hadn't been feeling well for the last couple of days--no energy, no enthusiasm, just sort of slogging through everything that I needed to do each day--and I was worried that I was coming down with a bug, right when the kids were about to come back from California and I'd want to spend all of my time with them.

But then the kids came back, hauling their backpacks down the boarding ramp and beaming, then running to hug me and tell me all about their trip. Apparently, there'd been a THIRD unaccompanied minor on their flight, a six-year-old boy, and all the children had been sat together in the same row, where they played happily and chatted for the entire flight. Syd even told me the partially incoherent story of how a woman sitting behind them told them that she was a teacher and that they behaved really well and "did great nouns!" (Mad Libs, don't you know?).

Anyway, what with all this telling, and admiring their candy stash (trick-or-treating went VERRA well in La Jolla...), and getting them settled into the car, and hearing all their stories, and seeing all their souvenirs, it didn't occur to me until hours later that hey! I felt great!

I hadn't been getting sick those last couple of days without my kids. I'd just been sad.

Eclipse Unseen

When the sunny morning of our fire station field trip turned into the partially cloudy afternoon of the kids' homeschool group's Halloween party and then into the completely overcast late afternoon of the partial solar eclipse, I was so, so bummed.

Hoping for a break in the clouds, the kids and I nevertheless spent the time of the eclipse over at the drive-in, hanging out with blankets, books, and eclipse glasses. That break never came, but fortunately, it's easy to keep oneself entertained at an empty drive-in movie theater:

Ring around the Rosie

Red Light, Green Light

and reading (always)

I'm still researching our upcoming astronomy unit, but I'm really excited about beginning it this winter--the cold air of winter makes the night skies clearer, and the longer nights makes for plenty of time to stargaze before bedtime!

And as far as I'm concerned, it's not too early to start gearing up for our next total solar eclipse in 2017!

La Maestra

The kids and I began Song School Spanish a few weeks ago, and I'm loving it. The vocabulary IS mostly the same as in Song School Latin, just as I'd hoped, and this makes it easy to review--every day when we do memory work, I ask for the Latin translation of the relevant vocabulary terms just as I ask for the Spanish translation. I'm hoping that it will become natural for the children to differentiate and compartmentalize the different languages; unfortunately, I never did so, and although I have a reading and grammatical knowledge of several languages, whenever I try to communicate in them, what comes out is a sort of Spanglish-Icelandic-Welsh-Latin-Anglo-Saxon mish-mash. Not super comprehensible, but thank goodness for cognates!

My new favorite portrait actually comes from an assignment in the first chapter of Song School Spanish. The children were asked to draw a picture of their maestra or maestro; here's what Syd drew:

Other than the troubling depth of my crotch--and, well, the length of that one arm--this portrait is surprisingly spot-on, and I adore it. Yes, I do wear my hair like that. Yes, I always wear pants (clumsy, remember?). Yes, I'm always barefoot.

And yes, on this day I was wearing a T-shirt of Matt's that did read "God of War." It's a video game. The video game is just as inappropriate as it sounds, but the T-shirt's okay, other than, you know, the whole "God of War" thing.

I own MUCH more embarrassing clothing than this, though, so we all got off lucky.

Autumn and Electricity

Autumn is my favorite time of year on our university's campus, and we've taken full advantage of it, finding ourselves playing among the leaves in the woods and around the creeks before and after opera performances, during Girl Scout field trips, on the way to and from ballet classes, and on this particular afternoon, just for Will and I, during her sister's Nutcracker rehearsal:

Will and I were rushing across campus to catch the tag end of our university's Science Fest--normally we spend several hours at this event, but this was also Fun Show day, so a brief stint in the electricity lab was the extent of our science enrichment:

Riding a bicycle generator and lighting lights! We also got demonstrations/explanations of solar- and wind-powered generators.

 And yes, I say "our" science enrichment, because it was me that pestered the poor undergrad supervising this gadget--it's scanning for wavelengths in the air, picking up, on this afternoon, wi-fi and cell phone signals and a few other little unidentified frequencies:

I asked him if the cell phone spike would spike higher if I held my cell phone right up to the antenna, and got the go-ahead to experiment--it did! Would my Nook also cause a spike on some frequency? Nope! My car remote triggered a loud clicking on another antenna that had been quietly emitting static. It was so cool!

What it's actually for, I don't know, but I totally want to build one for myself now.

Horseback Riding to Music: The 2014 PALS Fun Show

One of the few things that I was legitimately sad about, when I began homeschooling, was the fact that the children would miss out on performances, and I'd miss out on attending them. As a child, I remember music pageants, Christmas performances, school plays, etc. How sad that the kids would miss out on these precious opportunities to perform for an audience!

Snort.

Yeah, the kids participate in PLENTY of shows, homeschooling or not, and Matt and I get absolutely our fair share of butt time on back-less bleachers and in dark auditoriums, watching them shine. They dance ballet, they fly on the silks, they walk the runway, they skate to music, and they ride around the arena.

This year's horseback riding show, the PALS Fun Show, was even more special and exciting for the kids than last year, as their riding instructor has just really outdone herself in making sure that the kids have an interesting and enriching curriculum. You already know how much I love the homework that she gives them (a weekly assignment to research and report on a horse breed; I also ask the kids to research and report on that breed's country of origin). This year, she also thought that the kids might enjoy performing as a mounted drill team in the Fun Show, so she choreographed a routine for them, practiced it with them for ages, and sent me home with the patterns so that the kids could practice it at home (they taped it out in our big family room and ran through it until perfect every single day).

The kids got to choose the music for their performance, and after much listening to many songs, and my realization that my kids don't really ask for or take a lot of interest in non-narrative songs (their only real favorite album is The King, the Mice, and the Cheese by Stevesongs, and that's really more of a musical), they finally settled on Blondie's "The Tide is High" and the Indigo Girls' "Get out the Map." For a while, Will was pushing for "The House of the Rising Sun," and for some reason the thought of them performing to it was super cracking me up, but I'm pleased that they eventually followed the path of the girl bands.

I really like arriving early, so that we can watch other riders perform:

I just like watching the other riders, but the kids do seem to always glean some new information or source of inspiration. For instance, the kids always ride with their horses on a long lead held by a volunteer, and another volunteer walking next to them (one of my favorite things about PALS is that it's EXTREMELY aggressive about rider safety), but as they watched other riders navigating the trail course in the arena, they noticed a kid, about Will's age, who was permitted to ride completely without walkers! GASP! They were enormously impressed, and have declared their new goal in riding to be showing their instructor that they can control their horses well enough to be permitted to ride without walkers.

Of course, I like the walkers! One lesson last term, the kids were practicing leading their horses, and Syd, walking while holding the lead right next to her horse's muzzle, tried to halt her horse but didn't brace herself so that when he didn't obey, she was pulled right off her feet. Before she could fall directly in front of her horse's front legs, however, her sidewalker snatched her up and set her back on her feet, and the lesson continued without a pause.

You'll notice the walkers in this video of their performance--one holding a loose lead in case she needs to take control of the horse, and one walking/jogging next to each child in case she needs to take control of the child. You will not, however, notice the music; although I'd been looking forward to getting a little teary while watching the kids perform to a couple of my favorite songs, I'd been very slightly bummed that this meant that I wouldn't be able to put their performance on YouTube to share with family and friends--can't play a video featuring songs that I don't have the rights to! And so although the kids were bummed that the stereo futzed during their performance and didn't play their second song (of course the kids carried right on, though, the troopers), I was actually pretty pleased--all I had to do was a little trimming, and I have a nice clip of the drill team performance, without that pesky music:

And after the performance, of course, are the judges' comments (Will has excellent posture!) and the prizes--

--and the fun times! Fun times include getting one's face painted, doing arts and crafts and coloring pages--

--hanging out with the other riders, and apparently eating one's weight in cookies, from what I witnessed with my own children, at least.

It was, indeed, a performance to make a Momma proud, and the perfect show for the kids to take part in--they worked hard, they were pleased with the results, and they've geared themselves up to work towards even bigger accomplishments.

And they have trophies! I wish that *I* still did stuff that won me trophies...

Tinkerbell and the Vampire

As the kids and I were packing on Sunday, I suddenly had a panicked thought and burst out with something like, "Oh, no! Kids, you have to go put your costumes on RIGHT NOW!"

Because if the kids are going to be in California with their grandparents for Halloween, then that's where they'll be wearing their costumes, and so if I wanted to take pictures of them in their costumes, it had to be before I packed them! Yikes!

Fortunately, the kids were excellent sports, and put on their whole Halloween costumes for me, just so I could take photos of them.

Sydney is Tinkerbell:

She created her entire costume with very little adult assistance--I showed her how to draft a dress pattern to her measurements, Matt showed her how to transfer it to fabric, I threaded elastic through the casing she sewed in the top of the dress, I helped her bend the wire of her wings, and I showed her how to glue the clear cellophane to the wire. Syd thought up the entire costume, then watched a Tinkerbell movie and paused it whenever Tinkerbell showed a new angle, so that she could sketch her design from all sides. She sewed her dress, cut out the details at the bottom hem, drew a template for the wire hanger wings to follow, then spent hours painstakingly hot gluing clear cellophane gift wrap to them.

Fortunately, because Syd can be quite hard on herself, her costume turned out just the way she wanted!

Well, except for the part about the wings making her really be able to fly. That part didn't work out at all...

Will's usually an easy girl to please about Halloween costumes. For her vampire costume, she let me wrap one of my old homemade Moby Wraps around her head as her hood. Matt bought her a black shirt and black pants from Goodwill, and although she was going to make her old standby, the plastic fork fangs, she actually received a set of fangs as a favor at a Halloween party, so she was good to go!

  

Again, this costume surprisingly doesn't confer any superpowers, either; nevertheless, leaping the chain that blocks the drive-in's driveway remains a fine pastime for young daredevils:

The kids will actually be trick-or-treating in La Jolla this year, and they've already been teased quite mightily about the treats that a swanky neighborhood like La Jolla shall surely yield--full-sized candy bars! Each kid her own pony!

For my part, my health is going to take an outstanding turn for Halloween this year, since unlike in previous years, I have not had to buy Halloween candy and then buy it again five days later because I ate it all, and in the best of all possible circumstances I will not spend all next week sneaking treats from the kids' Halloween stashes, either, because the day after Halloween they have another five-hour plane ride to get through.

Know what makes the time pass quickly during a five-hour plane ride?

Eating all your Halloween candy, I'm going to bet!

Years of Jack-o-Lanterns

Matt has teased me, since the children were very small, about my tradition every year of buying the kids a Funkin to carve, and then keeping that Funkin, with the kids' name and the date on it, for... well, forever.

"We don't have anywhere to DISPLAY three years (then four years, then five years...) of Jack-o-lanterns!" he'd point out quite reasonably. And, of course, there were also the real pumpkin Jack-o-lanterns to display, and the squash, and the lights...

Yeah, no room on that cozy porch outside our cozy house across the street from the park and a mile from downtown.

But we don't live there anymore. We live in a sprawling, oddly-shaped house outside of town, now, with lots of porches, a couple of them quite roomy. And one of those porches, it turns out, is the perfect spot to display several years' worth of Jack-o-lanterns, all in a row just like they should be:

We don't have neighbors real close, and don't expect any trick-or-treaters this year (in fact, our own trick-or-treaters are flying to California right. This. Minute!), and so this low stone wall, facing our large picture window, is the perfect place to make a Halloween display that faces its most important audience--US!

I made that Halloween bunting ages ago, and I love pulling it out every year. In fact, I may make one for every holiday, now that I see how nice it looks in front of the wall:

I was given these spider lights for free from QVC, as part of the You're Home with Jill DIY Halloween Challenge, and I really like them. They're sturdy and realistic and even though they're Halloweeny, Will has already requested that we hang them in her room after the holiday.

We're going to. Of COURSE.

And then, yes, you do get to see every single Jack-o-lantern, all in a row, just because this year I finally can!

 

Now, don't you think there's plenty of room on that wall (or the ground in front of it) for several more decades of Jack-o-lanterns?

My Latest: Halloween and Wood Burning

a round up of Jack-o-lantern projects

and one of luminaries and lanterns

and a discussion of one of our favorite tools, the wood burner

One of the things that I'll definitely be doing next week with the kids in California (Weep! Wail!) is kicking the DIY into high gear. I've got several projects that I'd like to get created and written up--black walnut ink and dye, another bookshelf makeover, a portable set-up for a wall-mounted Hot Wheels track that is super getting on my nerves, a T-shirt quilt for a baby cousin, some new dyed play silks, etc.--and I'm enthusiastic about the idea that the more of my paid writing that I get scheduled then, the more time I'll have to spend with the babies when they get home, lightly tanned, arms full of souvenirs, flush with adventures.

I'll just keep telling myself that this time next week they'll be back home with me!