Our Duct Tape Wallets

When Will mentioned that she wanted a wallet, instead of being normal and just going out and buying her a dang wallet, I said, "Ooh! I've been dying to make duct tape wallets!" and I instead went out and spent twice as much money on duct tape (I bought this exact set, and we've been very happy with it).

Because this:

image via Something Turquoise and Death to the Stock Photo

When I craft via tutorials, I generally use photo-heavy written tutorials, but I've found that when the kids use tutorials, mostly for their Sculpey creations but also for the occasional other random project, they really find video tutorials the best. There's lots of rewinding and playing segments over and over again, but also, I think they just find watching another person making the actual muscle movements required to be the modeling that's needed for a lot of these more sophisticated projects.

We skimmed through several YouTube duct tape wallet tutorials, blowing some off for poor lighting, some for having over-engineered wallets, some for requiring materials I didn't feel like finding (a lot of tutes include a clear plastic piece so you can make a window for your driver's license, but I have never been in a situation in which I was asked for my license and showing it via that clear plastic window sufficed, so I don't see the point of it), but finally we settled on this one:



Why are all of the most useful YouTube tutes created by teen girls?

Don't answer that. I don't really want to know.

Anyway, with the tute at the ready, rewound and played over and over, the wallet creation was more-or-less a walk-through:

Surprisingly, it was Syd who needed some help with this, as you can see in the photo below, in which I've got one of her duct tape pieces on my mat. She's generally "craftier" than Will, but she's also far less tolerant than Will of results that deviate from what something is "supposed" to look like, and she gets frustrated more easily. Once I helped her even things up, though, she was happier:

I wish I'd had more of my secondary color in my wallet, but somehow I ended up only cutting enough of it to make one inside pocket on each side from it, not realizing that meant that only the very top bits would show. I like Will's wallet, center, which has her secondary color used for all of the binding, and Syd did both of her inside pockets on each side in her secondary color, which also looks nice:

Here's a closer view of the inside. There are two hidden pockets that open towards the center, and the pocket for bills that extends the entire length of the wallet and opens at the top:

The kids weren't interested in futzing with their wallets anymore after they'd completed them, but I couldn't stop until I'd put a little duct tape embellishment on my wallet. I cut out a shark stencil, traced it onto duct tape that was still on the roll, then cut the stencil out of the tape with duct tape scissors (that work only okay on duct tape, but they're better than working super crappy, as other scissors do, I guess?)

I could have done a much neater job on my shark, but eh.

This isn't the wallet that I use every day, although it really is sturdy enough that you could. It's now the wallet that I keep in my backpack, with a little emergency money and a few membership cards and discount cards, etc.

Because if you've ever seen me around town, walking down the street like a pack mule with my gigantic Army surplus backpack stuffed full of crap, you've noticed that what I really need is just one more thing to put in it, amiright?

Christmas and Cookies 2016

This was my children's first Christmas in their own home. The first time in 22 years that I haven't taken a road trip to Mamma and Pappa's house for Christmas.

I tried to keep it calm and mellow, the better to mask when I needed to go hide in the bathroom and cry for a few minutes, and, of course, I had to honor my Southern heritage of eating one's pain, and that meant---

Cookies! ALL THE COOKIES!

Syd and I made the gingerbread dough the day before, let it chill, and then Matt and I cut out the house pieces and baked them that evening after dinner. The next morning, a cup of coffee in one hand, I melted some chocolate and assembled them. After breakfast on Christmas Eve, they were ready to decorate!

 We really only "needed" gingerbread houses--

--and a couple of cookies for Santa--

Will has posed with her finished gingerbread house just like this every single year since she was five.

--and yet somehow we ended up with over a dozen gingerbread cookies extra AND an entire batch of homemade sugar cookies, to boot...

Okay, this gingerbread person might be a *little* inappropriate. I'd possibly broken out the bourbon by this point...

Syd got to this Millennium Falcon before Matt did, and decided that it was a bunny.

Meanwhile, Will turned the actual bunny into an alen.

Another alien

Syd decorated these to leave out for Santa.

And I don't really know WHAT she was thinking when she decorated this guy!

As much as I miss Pappa, I will say that it was nice to go to sleep in my own bed on Christmas Eve, and to wake up in my own bed on Christmas Day, sit in front of my own tree on my own floor--

Dog included!

 --and see what Santa brought everyone.

Santa brought Syd a Rapunzel doll and Will some magnetic Thinking Putty.

Will's grandma gave her a game of Exploding Kittens.

I bought the kids this marker airbrush, and as soon as I'm done writing this, I'm going to go snatch it out of their arms and play with it!

Syd gave Will some bracelets. She liked them.

Will gave Syd a charger for her tablet and a pair of headphones. She REALLY liked them!

Somehow even the cats and the dog ended up with presents.

Gracie LOVED her cat toy.

Luna did NOT like this Santa hat.

Will is super into dragons, so I bought her this handmade stained glass one from Glass Castle Arts.

My brother-in-law and his girlfriend bought us our newest Most Favorite Game EVER.

 And my mother-in-law introduced Will to the phenomenon of the Softest Blanket EVER:

She has been in this blanket burrito pretty much ever since.

 I never could figure out why you'd want to eat another traditional American feast just one month after you already had one, so we went to our favorite Indian restaurant for Christmas lunch (I thought we'd be the only ones there, but it was hopping!) and came back home to lie on the bed with comfy and full tummies and watch TV, play with stuff, and color for the rest of the evening.

Oh, and eat cookies until our tummies were no longer comfy. Can't forget the cookies!

It was... okay. And next year, I have high hopes that it will be better than okay.

A Visit to St. Nick, and the Christmas That I'm Enduring

I had a different kid a year ago. I had a kid who I bribed to do her schoolwork. Who took every instruction, whether it be "brush your hair" or "please pick up that piece of paper from the floor" as an invitation for a fight to the death.

Who refused to visit Santa.

This year, that same kid sits down and completes all of her schoolwork every day without prompting. She has her moments, but she's a genuine help most days. She even brushes her hair!

The other kid, mind you, hit her tweens the second that she turned ten, and she's now my kid who sneaks out of her schoolwork and wanders off to play when she's given a chore.

But she's still very much a kid at heart--they both are, really--and this year, hallelujah, I was able to get them both over to Santa's couch for a nice little visit:

It was a Christmas miracle.

Of course, you can't visit Santa at the Children's Museum without doing all the other stuff at the Children's Museum, too!

I didn't realize something until we were in the dino dig pit for the thousandth time in the children's lives and a friend whom we'd met there asked me how this set-up is different from the real dino dig site. I looked around us, blinked in surprise, and said, "Huh. Not much, actually!" The experience of digging, chipping off the matrix from the fossils, is pretty similar to what it's really like to expose fossils in the field. The walls around the pit contain a 360-degree panorama of what actually does seem to be our South Dakota dig site. And outside the dig pit is a wall with more fossils to chip out, and those fossils are embedded into a bank that is just about identical to the actual bank that we actually dug actual fossils out of!

Every Christmas, and again in February, the museum transforms its stairway into a slide!

Last year, one of these kids would NOT ice skate on the pond.

This year, however?

Yeah, she seemed to feel okay about letting loose.

 This one's always okay with letting loose!

I'm not going to lie--this Christmas is hard. I feel guilty every time I mention how hard this year as a whole has been for me, because there have also been so many amazing and wonderful things. I mean, how petty does someone have to be to call a year in which they went on a cruise to Alaska "hard"? It feels gross to call it such. Babies are dying in Aleppo. I'm lucky and I know it.

And yet... this year has been hard. This Christmas is hard. Not even a minute ago, in response to something casually cruel that Will said (despite her attitude change, she *is* still a tween...), I looked up from this computer and said to her, "I'm not going to tell you that you can't feel the way that you do, because you can, but I will tell you that you're feeling that way because you're immature. I would give so much to be able to see my grandparents again, and one day, when you're more mature and it's too late, you're going to feel the exact same way."

The last time that I saw my grandfather was last Christmas.

So I'm really not trying to make this "the best Christmas ever" or any of that other crap. I'm just trying to get through it. I'm putting on my game face as well as the holiday music. I'm faking it until I make it. I'm doing all of the other cliches that describe what you do when you need to make something great for your kids while you, yourself, are feeling deeply sad.

It's a fortunate thing, though, that when you deliberately try to give happiness to your kids, they have a tendency, the little ice skaters and Santa's lap sitters and pretend dino diggers, to give it right back to you.