Wolfie says: "give me the candy, or else!"

art days: spooky pop-ups!

This year I get to be art mom again in the 7 year old's class. It's one of my favorite ways to pass a morning. I think the most popular project we did last year was pop-up card-making, so we tried it again except this time we made pop-up haunted houses with graveyards since it's almost Halloween. Plus everything is more fun for kids, I've found, if you can somehow work in death.

This is the boring adult one that I made for the example. The kids' scenes were so much better but I didn't bring my camera and they took them all home so you'll just have to imagine little paper houses with lots and lots of tombstones glued all over them, and lots and lots of skinny pop-out haunted structures.

In case you've never tried a pop-up, here's a quick how-to. You can adapt it into all kinds of things, building on the idea of a piece of paper folded in half, and cutting lines in pairs. Draw your lines (here's for one haunted mansion: very easy), cut, and reverse-fold the paper between your two cuts (see how I just bent the paper the other direction, in the fold?). To add tombstones just cut little tomb-y shapes, and make paper tabs to glue on the back (the tabs are better than just glue or tape because they also help to prop up the tombstones from behind).

You can also make moving-mouth pop-up cards very easily - again, a total hit with the kids. They will think you are a magician. Instructions are here. Here's the 5 year old's...(You could totally make a vampire!)

Have fun scissoring...

clan wear

As if the blond hair were not enough to announce to the world that these girls are sisters, two little matching dresses should help. Remember the matching mother/daughter Laura Ashley dresses from the 80's? I think I'm feeling deprived from never having belonged to this exclusive group of wearers. Thus I sewed a pair of clan dresses to define my little clan. I don't think I would go to the point of wearing a matching dress myself--a bit over-the-top perhaps!

more village frock patterns!

Finally we've got more village frock patterns in our shop! This beautiful frock in denim was made by Adriana of theprincessseam.blogspot.com. If you have made a village frock, we'd love to see it! You can post it on our group flickr site.

class pet

The 5 year old came out of Kindergarten on Friday triumphantly swinging the blue canvas class kindergarten bag containing Peter the Kindergarten pet that all the kids get a turn to bring home one weekend during the year. Her popsicle stick, after weeks of agonizing waiting, had finally been drawn.

She decided that Peter and Padme (her beloved Webkin stuffed cheetah) needed to get married while he was with us. Love knows no bounds.

I immediately jumped on the stuffed animals-marrying-each-other-bandwagon and quickly discovered that the 5 year old was a very demanding wedding-arranger, which I clearly should have anticipated. It was very stressful. Especially considering that it was only two stuffed animals pretending to get married on our front porch. I feel nervous and worried for what one day lies down the road. My girl had a very specific idea of what Padme's wedding dress should look like, whereas I, the maker of animal wedding dress, was thinking more along the lines of cutting out a piece of white fabric and safety pinning it on Padme. We reached compromise only when I pulled out the glue gun and offered to glue some fake flowers to the wedding cape.

It was a beautiful moment.

...and we have a winner - THE MOST HORRIBLE PARENTING MOMENT EVER

Sarah, bless your heart:

"Our most humbling moment as parents happened just after I had our second child. My son was just over two at the time and had not quite figured out the rules of potty training. I was recovering from a week of my own stomach virus - just what a nursing mom of a 2 mos old and a 2 year old needs - so when my husband asked if he could take our son on a run and shoe shopping, I jumped at the chance to send the newborn along as well. Thinking of this as a rare chance to fit in a run, and being a novice daddy of two, my husband arrived at the shoe store with both kids only to realize that the stroller wouldn't fit in the store and he had no pockets to carry his cell phone and wallet or baby carrier to facilitate carrying the infant. Determined to make do, he balanced the wobbly headed baby in one arm and his device/wallet in the other arm while running after our pinball of a son who was already 4 feet ahead, rifling through boxes, pulling shoes off the shelf... Frantically straightening in the wake of our son, at some point my husband looked up to find he'd lost the 2 year-old. Thankfully, another shopper pointed my husband to our son, now poised in the doorway of the store with his pants at his ankles. Peeing. Humiliated, my husband rushed to the front of the store at unhuman pace, with the bobbly headed infant, wallet and phone all precariously balanced in his arms. By the time he reached the front of the store, our son was pooping. Knowing he hadn't considered this a possibility and so didn't have a diaper or a stitch of wet wipes in the stroller - it was after all supposed to be a 30 minute trip - immediately ducked into the now long line at the cashier to ask for something to clean up the mess. At this point our son is standing in his "wipe-me" position with bare poopy bottom high in the air yelling "Daaaaah-ddy! Daaaah-ddy!" We've become HUGE zappos.com fans as a result of that experience. Two years later, we can still make out the discoloration on the pavement at the store front."

All of your stories were so, so, horrible but Lauren thought this was the worst, and she thought Sarah got extra points for having the wherewithal to send her newborn along with her husband.

Thanks for sharing. I wish I could send you all packages! We all deserve them!

It's my Birthday!

(photo by Monika Elena)
What a shameless way to start a post. But to celebrate, I've decided that what I most want to do most on the internet today is air a long-held grievance: why do we women feel like we have to do everything perfectly? Pretty much all of the women I know try their best to do whatever they are involved with as well as they can and still think they do a bad job. So today, let's embrace that bad job. I want to have a contest for your stories - the worst, funniest parenting moments that you've had. The honorary judge will be my hilarious and adorable younger sister Lauren who has earned the ability to judge this contest by having the following morning, which I will now share with you here so you too can fully appreciate her credentials in this realm (taken from her blog):

"So this has taken me a while to post and comes with no pictures. I was too mortified at the time to take pictures. What can I say - a vacation with kids has to come with naughty moments. We planned a month long summer vacation out West - starting and ending with my in-laws in Utah. Our first morning here I don't remember much because I was a little jet lagged (arriving at 3:30 am by myself with the 3 kids NYC time). The second morning Abby came into my room at 6 am with a fiercely bloody nose from the altitude change. The third morning Abby came into our room at 6:30 am - I jumped out of bed immediately for fear she had another bloody nose but she was covered in something else .... something white. So I go downstairs with her and see the entire kitchen is covered in flour and powdered sugar. My father-in law is starting to clean it up and is covered in it as well. Not so easy to clean though because Abby and James dumped out several bags of powdered sugar under about five bags of flour. My father-in-law said he came donwstairs and James was carrying the big glass flour jar into the foyer saying 'too heavy'. Fortunately that did not break. There were trails of wet toilet paper all over the kitchen as well from the kids trying to clean it up once they realized they had done something wrong which made it harder to clean because it was all sticky. Abby tried to cover up the mess by getting the dolls upstairs [I would like to insert here: her monther-in-law's collector dolls] and using their hair as brooms so we had to clean up a couple of dolls as well. I tried to find ways to get them to help clean up but it was really easier to get them out of the way and make them wipe the floor with paper towels after it was all cleaned up."

This story makes me laugh harder each time I hear/read it. So, if your best bad moment fits in a comment, leave a comment, or if it's too long email it and we will share it that way. The writer of the most horrible experience as judged by Lauren will receive 1. our deepest sympathies 2. a large bag of chocolate & candy treats, meant for you to eat by yourself after all the kids go to bed and 3. A copy of my most favorite I-need-an-escape book I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. And if I happen to know you here in my little California town I promise to babysit your kids for you for an afternoon while you go see a movie all by yourself and find some emotional healing.

Please get this leaf off of my head!

I'm heart-broken. My friend Marcia moved away. She has a genius mind and always has the most insightful observations. One of my favorites: the ant theory. This theory compares us humans to ants living in Central Park. We are all so busy working, each carrying a burdensome leaf on our head, that we never pause to look around us. We never look up and see this amazing world we live in. Ahh, there's a whole world out there, so much bigger than we ever imagined. If we could just take those blasted leaves off our heads, every once and a while and look up, maybe our lives would be different.

Did any of you see 60 minutes two weeks ago about the Hadron Collider? Talk about broadening our views. Essentially the goal of the collider is to crash the tiniest particles together and recreate the conditions that existed at the very beginning of creation. The physicists interviewed said that through these experiments, humans might be able to better understand the nature of the world--how particles behave and interact. Perhaps even learn to transport humans through space, on a particle level. Some think that when the collider is actually set in motion, it could create a huge black hole that could suck us all into it. Though an unlikely scenario, we may, said the scientists, over time, be able to discover other dimensions of time and space.

I'm definitly a leaf carrier, perhaps sometimes a bit too over-focused on the chore at hand. Forgetting the big picture. My husband is naturally more of a big-picture sort of person. On Saturday, after he (most kindly) made several trips to the dump (to discard our broken old garage door,) the family got in the car for a little trip to the apple farm. When I sat in the car, my eye immediately caught sight of big hole in the smooth fabric ceiling of the car, apparently made while transporting the old garage door. Then I looked to the side of me and saw a tear in the leather on the door, then a big scratch all along the interior of the car. I pointed it out to my husband. "Oh well," he said. And that was that. But I could not take my eye off of that hole, and that tear and that scratch. The entire car ride, that's all I could see. I was completely consumed by my time and place and couldn't stretch my neck above it to see a broader view.

Somehow, the next day, Sunday, it all washed away, and I didn't care about it anymore. I had caught a glimpse of something bigger, something more important, and I let it go. I find that having a day to let go of temporal things, and focus on the mind and spirit, helps me to renew and take that blasted, blinding leaf off my head--at least for a few days!

(Oh and yes, this photo is of my husband's view from his office, overlooking Central Park. Now I know; that's it! It must be this view constantly before his eyes. That's what gives him a big-picture perspective!)

servant dress, revisited

It's finally getting a little chilly here in California which makes my heart so, so happy. Definitely time to make some new fall dresses. So, I've discovered that the servant dress is highly adaptable: the fold-over style of it is simple enough that it's pretty easy to experiment and with a couple of pleats and a ruffled collar, come up with a dress that is entirely different.

Unfortunately the five year old does not like to be still for photographs (the subliminal servitude message STILL hasn't taken).

But you get the picture. (For any of you who have the servant dress pattern and might be interested in making this variation, I'm going to put instructions in a file (hopefully in the next couple of days) in a sidebar on the blog, so you'll be able to hopefully click and print out.)

the wanderings coat

A wanderings coat for all adventuresome girls--girls who like to wander in the woods, looking for enchanted creatures and earthy cottages. The woods are full of mystery, conducive to girlhood wonder, so in the woods they like to wander. But when woodsy wanderings find no place in our busy schedules, the next best thing is a wanderings coat, perfect for childhood wandering, yet much safer and much more convenient. This can be a true mind-wandering machine to help your girl's mind to wander whenever you need her to the most: in long post office lines, in Doctor Reiss' waiting room, or during the too-long subway ride. Your girl simply opens up the coat, pulls open the little fabric house, and enters her own little make-believe world. Which chair fits in which bear pocket? And who gets the big bowl of soup? Too hot, too salty, or just right? Is that Goldilocks hiding behind the bear's door? Suddenly your girl is transfixed, transported into a peaceful reverie...

So for all those moms seeking a little tranquil wandering, this coat might be perfect. (It's also super warm and super soft, with earth friendly heavy linen on the outside, and a lucky vintage find on the inside.) Patterns will be ready within a month, unless my mind wanders off and gets lost inside the wanderings coat!

-More Princess Sugar Loom kits in the shop today.

Joslyn has been posting lists all week of goals that people have made - specifically small do-able things, all to be done before your next birthday. Since I usually set impossible goals related to my many character flaws (things like: "return all phone calls promptly" - or - "never forget anyone's birthday, ever again" (happy birthday, Jen!) ) this is a refreshing approach.

For the sake of personal accountability, here is my list, then. "31 things before 32." But since it's close, in the interest of the whole do-able factor I am going to pretend like I am turning 9. I can do these, right?

1. Update family's 72 hour emergency kit (you never know)
2. finish the boy's Sugar Loom
3. take just the boy out for ice cream
4. take just the girl out for tea party
5. finish painting family room! (a project begun a year ago. Completion of this project may be iffy)
6. make my house smell nice (*any suggestions here?)
7. get my visiting teaching done early in the month
8. learn how to play just the first page of Claire de Lune (why did I not practice when I had the time). But I won't do this unless I've finished goals 1,2,3,4,5,6, and 7. *Nevermind. This is just a totally unrealistic goal. Off list entirely.

mug shots

I love this Heather Ross gnome fabric, purchased from my friend Cheryl (who is doing a giveaway on her blog of some very cute halloween trick or treat bags, by the way). Servant pattern with long sleeves - quick and easy.